Interview with Dr. Rela at CAHOCON 2024

Transcript

Hello Doctor Ella, welcome to the 8th edition of the Kaho Chan at Bishop Bangla Convention Centre in Kolkata itself. So my first question would be as the managing and as the Chairman and Managing director of Rela Hospital renowned for its liver transplant program, what pioneering techniques or advancements have you introduced to improve patient outcomes and surgical success rates in the liver transplant tissue? The the first thing to do is to actually give confidence to the public that liver transplant operation is highly successful in India. The outcome of liver transplant in India now is not inferior to any other part of the world. Personally, I have an interest in liver transplantation for children. When I first came here 10 years ago, people thought that these children will not grow up and develop like a normal child, won't have a normal education. But we've been able to show in the last 10 years that when children have liver transplant, they grow up to be normal both intellectually and physically. And and that has actually increased the number of pediatric liver transplant. We have one of the largest experience now of transplantation of children in the world. OK, in terms of techniques that. We have developed the most recent development that's happened in the field of transplantation is the robotic transplant, the robotic donor operations because the donors are usually young individuals who are donating to someone else and land up with a big scam. And particularly young unmarried women who are donating for their parents, it's actually best that we can show that they will have no scar so that people come forward for donation much more than they would because we have had experiences that when young ladies donate have a big scar, it's very difficult for them to get married in our society. So these are the developments that we have brought about recently that was lovely. So my second question would be how does SRILA hospitals expertise? And experience contribute to the discussion and sessions at Kahuku on and what specific insights or experience do you hope to share or gain during this participation. Now the the interesting thing about Kaho Chan, this is the first time I've come to this meeting and I'm really amazed at the attendance and the number of people who are there. I think there are about 2000 people attending this conference, so. It's it's interesting and also it's it's good for me to see that people are focusing on quality. I think it's very important that Indian medical professions and Indian hospitals focus on quality which has been lagging behind. We have been lagging behind for many years and the 2nd is really access to medical treatment and and I think that's also been focused on, I come from a field which is very expensive like bone marrow transplant. We had a talk on that where they said that both men are transplant cost 25,00,000. Most people won't be able to afford that. Similarly liver disease affects ordinary people. Liver disease is not a disease of wealthy people and if they have end stage liver disease they're transplantation is going to cost about 25,00,000 and lifelong immunosuppression and how is this going to be made available to public generally and my feeling is efficiency like what you're talking about. Effectiveness is what you're talking about. And then locally manufactured drugs which are cost effective. Work needs to be done on all of this. And finally, I think NGOs and the public sector will have to take the burden of the cost of treatment. It cannot be just the private sector which can provide treatment at this level of cost to make it available to everybody. So equitable, equitable is equity is another thing, which is Kohl's. Principles. And if this treatment is going to be equitable, it needs to be shared by all and a huge amount of responsibility has to be taken by the government. So my last question would be as one of the prominent speaker for the Kahuku on this edition. So how was your overall experience? I I would say very good. It's better than my expectation. When I came here, I didn't think it was this big. I am very happy that I came to this meeting and it's very important that this kind of meeting is held in India to improve awareness on quality for both the professionals and the hospitals. Thank you. So it was so lovely to.