Mata Amritanandamayi plans India's largest private hospital near Delhi

Kerala-based Mata Amritanandamayi Math will open a multi super specialty hospital in Faridabad, near Delhi, on August 24. While the hospital will have a 500-bed capacity to begin with, it is designed as a 2,400-bed hospital, when fully operational. This will be the second super specialty Amrita Hospital after the 1,200-bed tertiary hospital launched by the Math 25 years ago in Kochi, Kerala. Spread across 133 acres of land in Faridabad, the hospital is coming up on a total built-up area of 1 crore square feet, including a 14-floor-high tower that will encompass the key medical facilities and patient areas.

According to hospital authorities, the hospital will offer free and subsidised treatment to deserving patients, and will adopt a cross-subsidy model to sustain the operations. While the treatment costs will be higher than that of its Kerala hospital, it is expected to be lower than the prevailing rates in other large private tertiary hospitals of the National Capital Territory region, they said. The authorities declined to disclose the project cost, saying the funding is mostly through donations from wellwishers and devotees of the Math.

The Faridabad hospital will have 81 specialties, including eight centers of excellence, such as oncology, cardiac sciences, neurosciences, gastro-sciences, renal sciences, bone diseases and trauma, transplants, and mother and child from the first day of operations. They expect the bed strength to be increased to 750 beds in two years and further to 1,000 beds in five years. When fully operational, the hospital will have a staff of 10,000 people, including over 800 doctors.

“This will be truly a world-class institution, both in terms of magnitude of scale as well as medical excellence. The hospital will have a total of 2,400 beds when fully operational, including 534 critical care beds, the highest in India. There will also be 64 modular operation theaters, most advanced imaging services, fully automated robotic laboratory, high-precision radiation oncology, most updated nuclear medicine, and state-of-the-art nine cardiac and interventional cath labs for clinical services. Cutting-edge medical research will be a strong thrust area, with a dedicated research block spread across a 7-floor building totaling 3 lakh square feet with Grade A to D GMP lab with focus on identifying newer diagnostic markers, AI, ML, bioinformatics, etc. We are in the process of entering into research collaborations with some of the world’s biggest names in medical science, including hospitals and universities,” Dr. Sanjeev K Singh, medical director, Amrita Hospital, Faridabad, said.

“The hospital will have the largest facility in the country to tackle infectious diseases. It will have an entire floor (1.5 lakh square feet) dedicated to mother and childcare, fetal and reproductive care and high-risk obstetrics with a 40-bed unit of nursery and Neonatal Intensive Care. The facility will boast India's largest pediatric super-specialty centre. We are also investing heavily in a comprehensive transplant program that will be among the biggest in the country. The hospital will be among the very few facilities in the country to conduct hand transplants, a specialty pioneered by Amrita Hospital in Kochi. We will also do transplants of liver, kidney, trachea, vocal chords, intestine, heart, lung, pancreas, skin, bone, face and bone marrow,” he added.

Dr. Singh, who has been associated with Amrita Hospital, Kochi for the last 18 years, said several senior doctors from India’s premium medical research institutions will be joining the hospital in the coming days. The institution will host a medical college and the country’s biggest allied health sciences campus. The hospital authorities said the training of medical students and doctors will be a strong focus area and the hospital will have a state-of-the-art robotics, haptic, surgical-medical simulation centre spread across four floors and 1.5 lakh square feet area, the biggest such learning and development facility for doctors in the country.

“The Amrita Hospital at Faridabad would be a substantial addition to the healthcare infrastructure of the country, with its patient catchment area extending all over North India and North-East India”, Dr. Prem Nair, group medical director, Amrita Hospitals, said.