What started as a clinic is a 140-bed hospital

BANGALORE: P D Hinduja Sindhi Hospital, which is celebrating its Golden Jubilee, is an example of how people with noble intentions can make it big with a few hundred rupees. It was an idea of eight young Sindhi businessmen to start a free clinic for the benefit of poor patients in and around Gandhinagar in 1961.The investment was just Rs. 800 but it was sufficient for a good cause. After serving people for more than a decade, the members of Sindhi Youth Association requested the state government to allot land to start a hospital at Sampangiramanagar. “The locality was a slum those days. We opened a 40-bed hospital in 1971,” says Suresh Bhatia, president, Sindhi Youth Association.The hospital had the privilege of conducting the first open heart surgery in 1980. “The patient was the daughter of a poor barber. The surgery was done free of cost since her parents could not afford the cost,” said Raja Jhumani, honorary secretary of Sindhi Youth Association.Over the four decades of its existence, the P D Hinduja Sindhi Hospital (PDHSH) has transformed into a modern, hi-tech secondary referral hospital serving the community with most of the specialty services round the clock.The hospital is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing quality healthcare services which are locally competitive and improving the well being of the community through quality programmes of preventive and curative medicine.On the occasion of their Golden Jubilee, four doctors from United Kingdom are conducting surgeries to about 22 patients in hip replacement, total knee replacement and deformities and cartilage repair from September 17 to 22  free of cost. Dr Anantha Ram Shetty from the UK has operated 10 patients in cartilage repair. The technique adopted by Dr Shetty is considered a landmark as this is the first-of-its-kind operation done in India. It was said that each of the cartilage repair operation done will cost between Rs. 1.50 lakh and Rs. 2 lakh but it was made available for just Rs. 40,000.The hospital is set to have a Golden Jubilee block that can accommodate 40 beds thus increasing the total number of beds to 140.The hospital has an operation theatre with laminar air flow system with centralised airconditioning system, most advanced anaesthetic equipment with in-built ventilator, harmonic scalpel for laparoscopic surgeries. “We do not have any marketing personnel for our hospital and we totally depend on word of mouth for publicity. We have achieved 80 to 90 per cent occupancy and have, on some days recorded 100 per cent occupancy,” said Dr T Chandrasekhar, director of the hospital.