Gandhi Seva Sadan Hospital, housed in a six-storied building on a one-bigha plot next to Gandhi Seva Sangha Buniyadi Madhyamik Vidyalaya in Sreebhumi, is set to offer a broader range of services.
Local MP and minister Sujit Bose made the promise of affordable healthcare when he spoke at the inauguration of the hospital’s in-patient department on Republic Day. “Gandhi Seva Sadan Hospital so far had only outdoor consultation facility. Now we will start indoor treatment as well. Sentiments of local people are associated with this hospital and so many of them have come forward with help,” he said, acknowledging some of them on stage.
Admission will start within a month. “It is a 100-bed facility but we will probably start with 30 beds and go up in phases,” Bose added.
Gandhi Seva Sadan Hospital
Easy on the pocket
The outdoor consultations have already gained popularity as doctors of repute are available for consultations. “There are 65 doctors who are providing service here. Our most popular OPDs are the orthopaedic and dental departments, followed by medicine and gynaecology. Their consultation rates are Rs 150 for general physicians, Rs 200 for specialists and Rs 250 for superspecialists,” said hospital chief executive officer Moloy Banerjee.
Bose also emphasised the affordability of the services. Ultrasonography of the whole abdomen costs Rs 800. “That’s half of the market rate,” he pointed out. CT Scan of the brain is Rs 800, chest and thorax Rs 1,400 and neck Rs 1,500. Contrast scan is also done for an additional Rs 1,500. “Guess how much a complete blood count costs? Just Rs 150 while most places will charge over Rs 400.”
The third floor has a nine-bed high dependency unit and a 14-bed intensive care unit, equipped with six ventilators. The neonatal ICU on the second floor is equipped with two phototherapy machines, two baby warmers and an incubator. “There are plans to buy a neonatal ventilator as well,” the official said.
Dialysis will also be done here in due course. “The RO plant, which is a necessity for dialysis, is already installed on the rooftop. For single use of the dialyser, the charge will be Rs 1,600. For repeated use, it is Rs 1,500 for the first time and Rs 800 henceforth. The dialysis unit on the third floor is segregated into two beds for the sero-positive (HIV, viral hepatitis etc) and 10 for non-infected patients.
A technician handles an anaesthesia machine in the modular OT with C-Arm machine
“We have about 20,000 sq ft space on every floor. There are two major operation theatres on the first floor, of which one is the highly sterile laminar flow OT, which has a C-Arm machine. A third is a minor OT,” said a senior hospital official.
The labour room and the sterile processing department for disinfecting medical devices and surgical instruments are on this floor too. There is also a three-bed ophthalmology operation theatre with black film and blinds on the windows. “This is for daycare procedures like cataract surgeries. The OT is equipped with an operating microscope, a non-contact tonometer, phacomachine and A-scan ultrasound machine,” the official explained.
The second floor has the male and female wards, with a total capacity of 45 beds. This includes the mother and child ward next to the baby-care units.
There is a three-bed emergency unit on the ground floor. “For emergencies like accidents involving face injury, we have the services of a maxillofacial surgeon along with a head and neck surgeon,” the official added.
The background
The school, founded in 1971, is over five decades old but the hospital came up much later, in 2016. “It is run by the Gandhi Seva Sadan Hospital Trust, of which Sujit (Bose) is the chairman,” said Dibyendu Kishor Goswami, the school committee president and a member of the hospital’s trustee board.
The land for the hospital had been handed over by Gandhi Seva Sangha, which, in turn, had received two bighas in gift for the school from the original landowners, the Shibkrishna Daw family of north Calcutta. The family was represented at the programme by a member, Subhas Chandra Daw.
The campus also has for long included a shelter for cancer patients. “People who come to the city from afar stay here at minimal rates during the length of their treatment,” said Dr Tapas Chattoraj, another trustee who has been associated with the hospital since the ground-breaking ceremony for the current building in 2010. “Before the new building came up, our outdoor consultations used to happen in the old Seva Sangha building,” he recalled.
The ophthalmology operation theatre equipped with microscope and A-scan machine
Bose mentioned two Gandhian residents of the area who had inspired him to build a hospital when he was a young councillor. “They were Manikyaratan Guha Thakurta and (educationist) Gyanendra Chandra Dutta, who had named Sreebhumi. My means were then limited only to opening a charity dispensary but I had noticed this plot of land and over the years I kept vigil so that it did not get gobbled up for other purposes,” he said.
The two friends, Guha Thakurta and Dutta, had laid the foundation of Sreebhumi, a nascent refugee settlement, in the 1950s and 60s. “They used to collect funds for social work by going door to door and established Gandhi Seva Sangha,” added Goswami.
The auditorium on the ground floor of Gandhi Seva Sangha, next door to the hospital, is named Manikya Mancha after one of them.
Show of support
The inauguration ceremony was attended by over a dozen doctors, most of whom are already attached to the hospital. They ranged across generations, from the 73-year-old gynaecologist Dr Bibaswati Roy, a Lake Town resident, to Shreebhumi girl Dr Nikita Jindal who has recently married and brought her doctor husband along.
Many knew Bose from long before he climbed up the political hierarchy, like ENT specialist Dr Santanu Panja, who recalled raising funds with Bose as a third-year medical student to save a batchmate’s life, and dentist Dr B.K. Biswas, whose marriage Bose had attended in the company of sports minister Subhas Chakraborty in 1997.
All of them promised support to Bose in his hospital venture.
