M. Dinesh Varma

CHENNAI: A public-private partnership is helping people in far-flung rural pockets to access quality healthcare at no cost at all.

The ‘Smile on Wheels’ pro¬ject, under which a bus equipped with a range of modern diagnostic and treat¬ment facilities visits different villages around Chennai dur¬ing the weekend, is an alli¬ance of Lifeline Hospitals, Perungudi (through its Rajaratnam Medical and Educa¬tional Foundation), and the Smile Foundation.

When the bus serving the underprivileged is not mak¬ing rural visits, it is involved in the government's pro¬gramme to perform free heart surgery on children of poor families.

The hospital has so far per¬formed more than 50 paediatric heart surgeries on children referred to it with cardiac ailments.

The interior of the vehicle has been thoughtfully designed to reserve the anterior space to seat 12 visitors, who are shown video clips on health issues as they await their turn for diagnosis, result or treatment.

The posterior has facilities such as a lab centrifuge, EFG, operation theatre, ventilator, sterilised instruments and an X-rays processing room.

Though it is equipped for mi¬nor surgeries, the project has kept off procedures following recent guidelines issued by the government.

“We hope a new set of norms will clear the decks for us to do minor surgeries,” says J.S. Rajkumar, chairman of Lifeline Hospitals.

Rotary District 3230 has al¬so joined the bandwagon, renting out the vehicle for an entire day. The money thus earned takes care of the ex¬penditure on consumables and ensures that the patient gets quality healthcare free of cost. “We expect to scale up from about 10 camps a month to double the number when more support flows in,” Dr.Rajkumar says.

In the long term, the hospi¬tal's outreach initiatives ex¬pect to focus more on delivering treatment to a pre-screened population.