IT’S 4pm and Dr Devi Prasad Shetty has only an hour before he has to leave for the airport to catch his flight home.
India’s most famous cardiac surgeon looks a little tired as he settles down for our interview at the Hilton Kuala Lumpur, but becomes animated when we start to discuss his favourite subject — affordable, accessible healthcare.
Dr Shetty is the man who’s credited with reinventing healthcare in India and through the Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH) Hospital in Bangalore which he founded in 2001, he and his team have made heart surgery affordable for even the poorest in India.
The clean-shaven, father of four, is nothing short of a celebrity in India’s healthcare industry and early in his career, he was moved to act when he saw the effect of ill health on the poor.
“When I was doing my internship, I used to boil eggs at home and bring it to patients in the ward who needed nutritious food. They ended up calling me the egg doctor!,” he says, chuckling at the memory.
Dr Shetty was in Kuala Lumpur recently to sign a joint venture agreement between NH and AriyaDana Equities Sdn Bhd for the setting up of Narayana International Medical Centre (NIMC) in Nilai, Negri Sembilan.
Raised in Mangalore, South India as one of nine children, Dr Shetty says growing up in a large family taught him to love people and this had a huge impact on him as an adult.
His father, a businessman and mother, a housewife, both had health concerns so doctors were highly respected in the Shetty household.
He himself wanted to be a doctor and heart surgeon at 12 after hearing his teacher announce that the world’s first heart transplant had been performed.
He says medicine is a unique profession because one can make a living while doing good for society. A meeting with Mother Teresa in 1992 when he was called to treat her after her heart attack, further reinforced his belief that the poor too must have quality healthcare.
He describes the late Catholic nun, famous for her work among the poor, as someone with simple solutions to life’s most complex problems.
“She once followed me during ward rounds and found me examining a baby with a heart problem. She told me that God was probably a little preoccupied when he created children with heart disease and then realised there was a problem and put people like me to fix it,” says Dr Shetty with a smile.
He says to bring affordable healthcare we have to change the way hospitals are built as 100 or 200 bed hospitals are not going to help us reduce costs, but 3,000 or 5,000 bed hospitals will do the job. “When you build a huge medical facility, large numbers of people can have surgery everyday and because of the economy of scale, your costs go down,” says Dr Shetty.
The NH, the largest heart surgery hospital in the world, carried out 6,000 surgeries last year, most of them on children. Despite this high volume, it boasts a mortality rate comparable with or better than hospitals in Britain and the United States. Malaysia has to date sponsored more than 140 children through MediAssist4U for specialist care surgery at NH with a 100 per cent success rate.
Dr Shetty says in Malaysia, heart surgery costs between RM20,000 and RM40,000. At the National Heart Institute, a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) is estimated at RM35,000 and valve replacement at RM35,000-RM45,000.
In the US, heart surgery ranges from US$50,000-US$100,000 (around RM155,000-RM311,000) but at NH, such procedures are done for about US$2,000 (about RM6,200).
Dr Shetty says Malaysia needs to build large 5,000 bed hospitals to lower costs and there should be super speciality hospitals in all states so patients can seek treatment without having to travel far from home and be away from family support.
NIMC in Nilai for example will provide medical services that are up to 30 per cent less than its competitors in Malaysia and the region and aim to follow Dr Shetty’s concept of increasing numbers to bring down cost.
Dr Shetty also recommends that the government initiate a low cost health insurance scheme that the poor can afford.
He says this is the way forward because no government can consistently offer free healthcare through taxpayers money especially given that life expectancy is rising throughout the world.
Dr Shetty helped initiate a similar micro insurance programme in India called “Yeshasvini” where for just 60 rupees (RM4) annually, health insurance is provided to farmers and other rural folk.
“It’s the greatest human tragedy when someone has to beg for money to save the life of a loved one. It happens simply because we don’t put into place policies to prevent it.”
http://www.nst.com.my/nst/articles/Health_Straighttotheheart/Article#ixzz15TaZB42F
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