Apollo Group of Hospitals plans to come up with three more liver transplant clinics across the country after it opened the third clinic here in Ahmedabad today, sensing the huge need gap in the segment.
"While around 70,000 people in India die annually due to lack of access to liver transplant, only 400 such operations were conducted in the country last year," claimed Anupam Sibal, group medical director of Apollo Hospitals International Ltd. He added that it is important to come up with regional centers, and the company will start its fourth liver clinic in Kolkata later this year to be followed up with two more in Hyderabad and Bangalore in 2011. India needs at least 10-12 such clinics, Sibal said.
The cost of setting up such a liver transplant clinic at any center that already has cardiac and kidney transplant related infrastructure is minimal, at around Rs 60-70 lakh.
It currently runs two liver transplant programmes in Chennai and Delhi and has achieved a 90 per cent success rate in the last 241 transplants since January 2007. Apollo Hospital, Delhi had performed the first successful liver transplant in the country in November 1998.
"Currently,the Mumbai region does not have any such facility, so we expect to draw patients from the adjoining states like Maharashtra and Rajasthan as well.", said Praful B Pawar, chief executive officer of Apollo Hospitals, Ahmedabad.
"We also hope to get patients from across the world, as the cost of surgery is much cheaper here in India with a success rate benchmarked against the world's best.", Sibal said adding that the cost of surgery in the US is around Rs 2.5 crore, in the UK it is around Rs 60 lakh while in Singapore it is around Rs 40 lakh. Here the cost is around Rs 15- 20 lakh while for children below 12 years it is lower at Rs 12 lakh.
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