We have been working towards bringing private players onboard to support a public scheme : Ritu Chhabria

Last year NICU in Sassoon Hospital, Pune was revamped by Finolex Industries and its corporate social responsibility arm, Mukul Madhav Foundation (MMF). Ritu Chhabria, Founder, Mukul Madhav Foundation, took us through the journey on how MMF works in various sectors including healthcare, sharing initiatives to transform the public and private healthcare in a conversation with Mansha Gagneja

Elaborate on the projects taken up in the healthcare segment?

We believe that the need of the hour is to give back to the masses and masses go to corporation hospitals. Over the years our work has spearheaded towards these institutions. We started work in the healthcare spectrum from the KEM Hospital, Pune in 2001 where we set the Paedriatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). We started with six beds and moved on to nine beds PICU. We further revamped many other departments including OPD, doctors room, nurses room, kids room and procedure
room. We are doing many medical camps along with KEM. We have 32 schools between Pune and Ratnagiri, where we bring in different departments from various hospitals for medical check ups in these schools and have also now collaborated with Red Cross.

Can you throw light on the work done with Sassoon Hospital?

Additionally, last year we have revamped the NICU in Sassoon Hospital, and the services have been availed by over 5000 children. We also provide funding to the patients to avail medicines. We have also helped in providing trainings to the doctors and been able to connect them for upgrading their skills. Further, we have monthly meeting with
Sassoon to understand their requirements and as a result we help them become more equipped at handling their patients by providing medical devices that they need.

The project was taken up in March 2016 to help upgrade the existing 35 bedded NICU facility at Sassoon general hospital (SGH) to set up 50 fully equipped units The NICU includes facilities like total parenteral nutrition (TPN), human milk bank (HMB), ROP screening and treatment, bedside 2D echo/ USG and hearing services (OAE machine).

Are you also working with any primary health centres?

There are 1880 PHCs in Maharashtra, and we have started working with 12 of them. We are planning to upgrade them, but are still waiting for the permissions to come through. Most of these centres are not functional and the doctors are not showing up. As a result I have written to hospitals and asked them to ‘Adopt a PHC’. We have been working towards bringing private players onboard to support a public scheme.

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