Healthcare in Chennai
[1][2][3] Multi- and super-specialty hospitals across the city bring in an estimated 150 international patients every day.
The Cancer Institute in Adyar was set up in 1954, and Sankara Nethralaya was founded in 1976, adding to the city's reputation.
Along with the Government General Hospital they served as renowned centres for diagnosis, treatment and research for decades.
India Home Health Care is one such service provider, based in Chennai and Bangalore with over 300 nurses.
[26] With people from across the country and abroad preferring to get treated in the hospitals in Chennai, the city is increasingly becoming a hub of medical tourism.
[27] According to a study by Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), Chennai attracts about 40 percent of the country's medical tourists.
[30] Foreigners, especially those from developing and underdeveloped countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, Burundi, Congo, Malawi, Bangladesh, Oman and Iraq, come to the city for advanced medical care.
[36] With more than 75 percent of the medical tourists being from the Middle East, hospitals in the city are vying for 'halal' certification.
[42] Other NGO example includes MOHAN Foundation that works for awareness for cadaver donation since 1997 and creating an organ sharing registry in the state of Tamil Nadu.
[43] A former superintendent of the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology in the city, Kirk Patrick, was the first to have found the adenovirus that caused conjunctivitis, leading to the name Madras eye for the disease.
Chennai recorded the first ever liver transplant in the country in the Government Stanley Medical College in the 1990s.
[45] In 2008, the state government established a cadaver transplant programme at the Chennai Medical College.
[47] The programme has a regular transplant-coordinator and a computerised network linking government and private hospitals.
It has been awarded the best performing state in organ donation and transplantation in India by the Indian government for 2015 and 2016.
[49][50][51] In 2009, a group of doctors and specialists in Chennai and Coimbatore registered the successful treatment of thalassemia in a child using a sibling's umbilical cord blood.
[52] In August 2011, the state government decided to convert the much controversial, half-constructed Assembly-Secretariat complex in the city, built at an estimated ₹ 10,920 million, into a multi-specialty hospital.
Located at Elavur village, 40 km from the city centre, the project will be executed in three phases.
The bio hospital is expected to be the first of its kind in India, designed as tertiary care in all sub-specialities of medicine supported by modern basic sciences including stem cell technology, tissue engineering and nanotechnology, which would also focus on integration of traditional and alternate medicinal technologies such as ayurveda, naturopathy, and siddha to the services.
The Chennai centre would cover the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Pondicherry, and Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep islands.
[58] Per a research published in the August 2011 issue of the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics, there was no evidence of falsification of medicines in a sampling study carried out in the city, though 43 percent of drugs were substandard.
