Free facility for heart patients

TT, Siliguri, Feb.8: The North Bengal Medical College and Hospital has started free pacemaker implantation on heart patients who are in a critical state.

Pacemaker is a device implanted in the heart or abdomen of a patient to help the heart beat at a normal rate. "The NBMCH is the sole-referral hospital for seven north Bengal districts and people from lower sections of the society visit the facility for treatment. We treat many patients with heart ailments and some of them need pacemaker implants. But because of lack of pacemaker-trained cardiologists at the hospital we couldn't carry out the implantation. However, a doctor recently received training in the procedure and so we decided to carry out the implantation for critical patients at the hospital totally free of cost. This has been done to benefit patients who cannot afford implantation expense in private hospitals or go to state-run hospitals in Calcutta," said a hospital official.

The cost of pacemaker and surgery together come to around Rs. 2.5 lakh in private hospitals.

He added: "We are not carrying out pacemaker implantation randomly because of lack of proper cardiac facilities at the hospital. Normally, such a procedure is carried out at the catheterization laboratory with imaging equipment to see the various parts of the heart. There is no such facility at NBMCH now, but we have worked out an arrangement with the orthopedic department to use their C-Arm machine which also helps in imaging for conducting implants when needed. In the past one month, we have carried out three such implantation at the major OT of NBMCH."