With 2 new buildings for its outpatient and inpatient depts, Lady Hardinge Medical College gets an infra boost

The new IPD block will have over 800 beds, which will be opened in a phased manner, and over 20 operation theatres, giving a major boost to the hospital’s infrastructure. The CT scan facility on the ground floor of the new OPD block was started last month, with the rest of the services to be moved soon.

The new buildings have wide corridors, large waiting areas at the entrance and in front of all the clinics to ensure patients do not have to keep standing in queues. The waiting areas in the hospital at present have temporary shades and ceiling fans, making it very hot. The new buildings, on the other hand, are centrally air conditioned.

The old building at Lady Hardinge Medical College.

“Of course, it will be great if we can wait in an AC room; we just stand in different queues from morning,” said Lalit, who came to the hospital on Monday to get his daughter treated for an ear infection.

The two hospitals associated with the medical college – Smt Sucheta Kriplani and Kalawati Saran – see around 3,000 to 4,000 patients in the outpatient clinics daily.

After a wait of more than 11 years, the project has also allowed the hospital to modernise itself – with automatic token dispensing machines and LCD displays to call on patients whose medicines are being given.

“We have created patient-friendly infrastructure now; we will treat all our patients as VIPs. Everything will be available under one roof. There will be Sunday OPD facility available too. There is a need to create more and more infrastructure,” said Dr Ram Chander, medical director, Lady Hardinge Medical College. He said there was a need to also increase the academic infrastructure with the number of MBBS seats going up.

Over the last two to three years, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences has also started its new OPD block with similar wide corridors and more waiting space. A burns and plastic block has also been started. The other central government-run hospital, Safdarjung, has also got a new Superspeciality and emergency blocks.

At Lady Hardinge, the existing buildings will be demolished and other centres will be set up in its place. Work is in progress for the second phase of redevelopment, which will focus on a 1,000-bed speciality centre for children and neonates.

The buildings were a long time coming. The redevelopment plan for the hospital — which was established as an 80-bed centre in 1916 and grew to become the current 877-bed Sucheta Kriplani hospital and 377-bed Kalawati Saran Children’s hospital —was approved by the government 13 years ago. The first phase of the construction, which focused on an alternative outpatient department that had been constructed in 1956, began in 2011.