Surgeon Devi Shetty?s Rabindranath Tagore International Institute for Cardiac Sciences. A Telegraph picture

Colourful walls and bright floorboards, low windows to help the little ones peer out at the blue sky above, nurses sporting cheerful floral motifs on their uniforms, an OPD where a medical consultation is like a picnic and an in-patient ward where the child can even catch up with lessons missed at school?

After giving the city a most successful heart hospital and the first composite trauma-care centre in the East, cardiac surgeon Devi Shetty, who enjoys a special affinity for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee?s ?advantage Bengal?, has set out on the mission ?closest to my heart? ? an integrated, multi-speciality, environment-controlled paediatric hospital.

To come up inside the proposed ?Health City? of the Asia Heart Foundation (AHF) in Mukundapur, off the EM Bypass, the unique hospital has been conceptualised to answer the special needs of the toddlers.

?Children are not miniature versions of adults, and you can?t just reduce the physical scale of the facility for them and think you?ve done enough. The entire environment in which paediatric medicine is administered has to be created with a lot of understanding, sensitivity and domain knowledge,? Shetty, AHF chairman, told Metro.

He will roll out the Calcutta facility once a similar speciality hospital is seeded by the foundation in Bangalore.

Paediatric surgeon Ashley D?Cruz, who is researching the critical inputs to go into the two projects, also emphasised the importance to understand the special needs of infants and older children.

?You can?t plant a sick child in the middle of a huge, intimidating general hospital, where the patient next to it is bleeding profusely and reeling under the impact of a road accident. Our effort is to create an ambience which will spare the child both physical and psychological trauma,? D?Cruz said over phone from Bangalore.

He has been brought to the AHF fold to start up the paediatric units after long and successful stints at the St James? University Hospital in Leeds and the Leeds General Infirmary, among the largest teaching hospital trusts in Europe.

The paediatric superspeciality facility, to be part of the cluster of hospitals in the Health City that will add up to 5,000 speciality beds, will bring together under one roof all relevant departments ? from paediatric cardiology to pulmonary care, neonatal surgery to neurosurgery ? and follow global standards defined by the National Commission for Health, in the US.

From the architecture of the hospital to the specially-designed beds and allied furniture, even the X-ray rooms and pathology will be child-friendly, created to ?eliminate the fear of doctors and hospitals? in the children?s minds the moment they walk in.

While 30-40 per cent of procedures can be done in the daycare ward, a special school will enable the kids to make up for lost lessons during the period they are admitted.

?The whole atmosphere, from theatre to ward, will be geared to console the children, stimulate their minds and put them at ease so that they are not emotionally drained from their hospital visit. It will be a home out of home for them,? Shetty explained.

The AHF hopes to cut procedure prices by 60-70 per cent once the speciality cluster of facilities is up and running, through measures like one central diagnostic lab and a shared imaging institute.

?We also plan to become one of the best teaching hospitals, with special thrust on research, academic and clinical work, as historically, that has been the survival mantra for all significant healthcare facilities around the world,? the ace of hearts added.

The foundation?s cardiac hospital in Bangalore, Narayana Hrudayalaya, has been shortlisted as a deemed university for medical studies.