Nagpur: "It gives me immense joy when my five-year-old son Mohammad Shahid now reacts to any sound. It is the joy of satisfaction that he can finally hear and may soon be able to speak," said Reshma Rubana as tears trickled down her cheeks.
"In fact, the same is true for my three-year-old daughter Fiza Firdos as well. She too was born with hearing and speech impairment. There can be nothing more joyous than getting hearing and speaking ability back of your children," she said.
Reshma is not the only mother who could get her children to hear after the cochlear implant surgery at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College (IGGMCH) and Mayo Hospital. Roshini Sheikh's four-and-half-year-old son too has got it through the cochlear implant programme started by IGGMCH last year.
These and many other families were earlier running from pillar to post for treatment of their children at Mumbai as there was no such facility of implanting such an expensive hearing aid (Rs13 or more lakh) in the city. But after IGGMCH set up the cochlear implant centre, the first in government medical colleges (GMCs) in the state, they are now getting this surgery done free of cost.
To channelize the patients and give them due treatment, IGGMCH on Thursday started an Out Patient Department (OPD) for hearing and speech impaired cochlear implant patients. This is the first such effort in the city and GMCs. The weekly OPD will run on every Tuesday between 11am and 1pm.
Dr Milind Mane, BJP MLA from north Nagpur said while speaking at the inaugural function of the OPD that the project had come to the college, his alma matter, after a lot of painstaking efforts. Getting companies to shell out money from the CSR is not easy. He requested Vikas Kumbhare, central Nagpur MLA, to help IGGMCH get the MRI and CAT scan.
In his address, Kumbhare said he would ensure that IGGMCH gets the funds on time before the inspection of Medical Council of India (MCI) to hold back recognition of 150 MBBS seats.
Viral Kamdar, director of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Institute of Medical Science, Research and Human Resources, who is also adviser to Union minister Nitin Gadkari, said there was a need for the state to follow Kerala-like policy in which the state contributes equal funds for running such projects. He said Gadkari had helped get 17 new institutes to the city and about 4-5 were in the pipeline.
Dr Anuradha Shrikhande, acting dean of the college, said the cochlear implant OPD will reduce the problems of parents who visit the hospital any day and run between paediatric and ENT departments. This will streamline the patient services. She also emphasized on publicity to the project so that more surgeries can be done here.
The programme was conducted by speech therapist Mruga Vaidya. Audiologist Neelu Somani was also present on the occasion.
