The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : MIOT Hospitals comes up with free schemes

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Sunday, Feb 15, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

MIOT Hospitals comes up with free schemes

Special Correspondent

— Photo: R. Ragu

JUBILANT OCCASION: MIOT Hospital chief P.V.A. Mohandas greeting hospital director Siegfried Weller and his wife Karin Weller during the tenth anniversary celebrations of the institution in Chennai on Thursday. Mallika Mohandas, hospital chairman, and U. Holz, director, are in the picture.

CHENNAI: MIOT Hospitals announced a slew of free treatment packages for poor patients to coincide with its tenth anniversary fete.

Established in 1999 as the Madras Institute of Orthopaedics and Traumatology on fallow land in Manapakkam, the tertiary care institution will perform 10 free procedures each in heart surgery, hip replacements, knee replacements and renal transplants. MIOT managing director P.V.A. Mohandas also announced that 100 paediatric heart patients would be treated free of cost at the institution.

MIOT would combine corporate care with a touch of compassion towards the underprivileged and set up a corpus fund to fulfil its social commitment, Dr. Mohandas said. Spelling out his vision for the hospital’s future, he said: “The hospital would as much fail in upholding its founding philosophy as I would in my loyalty to my humble origins in a village in the southernmost district of Tirunelveli, if the tertiary care at MIOT is kept beyond the reach of the country’s rural population.” Dr. Mohandas, who narrated childhood experiences such as showing up on the first day of a city school without shoes and turning laughing stock of urban-bred peers, said the hospital project was implemented on an initial German investment of Rs.5 lakh. He thanked everyone who contributed their mite as “money, cheques, saplings and even bird droppings for fertilising the soil.”

S.S.K. Marthandam, former Vice-Chancellor, Sri Ramachandra University, said MIOT exemplified the fact that a tertiary care healthcare institution was not founded on magnificent buildings but rather on the work ethic and dedicated teamwork of clinicians.

Siegfried Weller, MIOT Director, said the hospital’s mission statement of striving for “A Better Tomorrow and a Healthy Future for the country” was as valid then as it is today.

Prithvi Mohandas, MIOT Director, recounted his first brush with realism was when he was pitchforked into “the maelstrom of the Indian population” that visited the Madras Medical College.

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