Mumbai: St George’s Hospital to open its doors to all from May 5

The St George’s Hospital has been vacant

The 467-bed St George's Hospital next to CSMT is finally set to start non-Covid operations from May 5, after over two years. Hospital officials said the last three Covid patients were set to be discharged on Tuesday evening. The hospital has treated a whopping 6,627 patients during the pandemic.

On April 15, mid-day reported how the hospital was lying vacant due to its Covid status, leading to inconvenience for non-Covid patients who had to visit other hospitals, mainly Sir JJ Hospital, for treatment.

Hospital Superintendent Dr Akash Khobragade said, "We are ready to serve non-Covid patients. Sanitisation work is done and everything including the operation theatres is ready. We will also keep a separate ward for Covid patients. Apart from this, we are going to increase the number of ICU beds. Before the pandemic, we had only 10 ICU beds which will now be increased to 20. We have purchased fully automatic ICU beds."

He added, "During the Covid period, we had 122 ICU beds, many of which we got from the PM CARES fund and some through CSR. As there is a limited requirement, we will distribute them to other government hospitals as per the demand."

"We plan to start dialysis for patients suffering from kidney diseases too. We have around 12 dialysis machines which were used during the pandemic for Covid-positive patients with kidney issues," Dr Khobragade said.

An official from the hospital said, "The hospital has obstetrics and gynaecology, orthopaedic, MD medicine, ophthalmology, ENT and many other departments. Earlier, around 1,000 patients would come to the outpatient department and 20 to 25 patients used to be admitted every day. We also used to conduct 10 to 15 surgeries a day, sometimes even more. The hospital is also equipped with CT scan and sonography machines, which even take the load for Sir JJ Hospital when their machines go for repair or maintenance."