Swagat Super Speciality Surgical Institute in Guwahati is soon going to start liver transplant facilities informed the hospital authorities during a press meet on Monday.
Generally, liver transplant surgery is said to be very costly and is available in only three to four major centers in the country, that too in metro cities and the procedure currently costs Rs 30 to Rs 40 lakh in the Metro cities. Swagat Hospital’s newest addition has come as a gift for the people of Northeast. The hospital has announced that patients in need of liver transplant would be provided the service at the institute in about a couple of months.
“Liver transplant is a very labour intensive process needing special attention from specialists and frequent costly investigations in the postoperative period along with a long ICU stay. It also needs a cath lab with interventional radiologists and interventional cardiologists to monitor multiple anastomoses that are done during the transplantation, which Swagat Super Speciality has recently added,” informed chief medical director of Swagat Super Specialty Surgical Institute Prof. Subhash Khanna.
Apart from the medical costs, patients need to stay back for a long period of time after the surgery and need frequent lifelong follow-ups. The families sometimes need to go through various inexpressible issues which costs both time and money.
Swagat Hospital aims to cut the transplant costs down to affordable rates. “We will try to cut down the cost of such procedures to half,” Prof. Khanna said.
“Although kidney transplant is a routine in some of the centres in our country, it was a long-fought battle to get the government’s approval for liver transplant, given that it mandates a wide variety of resources and state-of-the-art facilities to meet up to the stringent guidelines,” he added.
While thanking the government on behalf of Swagat Superspeciality Surgical Institute, he introduced the team members of the liver transplant team which comprises Dr. Basant Mahadevappa (liver transplant surgeon), Dr Amitava Goswami (gastroenterologist and hepatologist) and the team of surgeons, along with the team who were instrumental in following up the transplant programme and making it a success.
Dr Mahadevappa is a transplant surgeon from Bangalore, who has performed over 276 liver transplants with over 20 years of experience and seven years of experience in liver transplant in the UK and has experience in both living and deceased donor transplantation.
Swagat will soon be announcing the special screening camp for the identification and selection of appropriate patients for liver transplants.
“In North-East India, there is a severe lack of liver transplantation facilities. We at Swagat Superspeciality Hospitals shall try to fill in that gap as we proudly announce the upcoming liver transplant facility in Swagat Hospital (a licensed liver transplant surgical hospital in North East India ). It is noteworthy that liver transplantation was started in Assam in one of the leading hospitals a few years back but unfortunately it is not being done regularly now. We hope that our initiative comes as a relief to the deprived patients of the state of Assam and Northeast India,” Swagat Superspeciality Hospital posted on Facebook.
