City Gets A New Affordable Cancer Care Hosp In Sobo | Mumbai News – Times of India

MUMBAI: The city has a new address for subsidised cancer care with the opening up of Punyashlok Ahilyadevi Holkar Head & Neck Cancer Institute of India near Dockyard Road railway station a week back.
Built and managed by the CanCare Trust of renowned oncosurgeon Dr Sultan Pradhan, the hospital has come up on civic land that housed a BMC-run maternity home until a few years back.
BMC additional municipal commissioner Dr Sudhakar Shinde said the hospital has begun functioning and focuses mainly on head and neck cancer, which accounts for 30% to 40% of all cancers in India.
The hospital administration has decided to use the same charges levied at the private wing of the centre-run Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel. While 80% of the 93 beds will have to pay the TMH charges, the remaining 20% will be treated free. The ‘free category’ patients will include economically needy patients as well as BMC employees, according to the memorandum of understanding signed between the BMC and the CanCare Trust.
“There was a need to create an institution that would have three important arms — subsidised care, training future generations of doctors and research,” said Dr Pradhan, who has over the last 20 years created training programmes for surgeons in various public hospitals in the city.
As the hospital opened on August 14, only about 30% of the beds have been commissioned. While clinics and surgeries have already started, chemotherapy sessions are likely to begin soon. Radiation therapy and imaging services too will start soon.
Apart from a focus on head and neck, it will also provide treatment for various cancers suffered by women such as breast and cervical cancers.
Two senior doctors from TMH have joined the new hospital; while Dr Prathamesh Pai from the department of head and neck surgical oncology has joined as director, and Dr Vani Parmar from the breast cancer surgery department has joined the new hospital.
The BMC’s Ahilyadevi Holkar maternity home had become defunct over the years as the composition of the area changed. The BMC signed an MoU with Dr Pradhan’s Trust to set up a cancer care hospital after identifying a shortage in this specialty. Work on the new hospital continued through the Covid pandemic and it opened on August 11.