Apollo Hospitals to expand its bed-count in Ahmedabad

Apollo Hospitals-Ahmedabad is planning to take its bed-count from 210 now to 350 within the next one to two years, besides looking at potential partnerships for opening smaller hospitals in other major cities of the state.

Praful Pawar, CEO, Apollo Hospitals Ahmedabad, said "We are planning to add around 150 beds at our Ahmedabad facility within the next one or two years. This would not require any significant investment from our side as the space is already there. We would just need to add more staff and relevant infrastructure".

He also added that the Apollo was in talks with developers to come up with small scale hospitals in other parts of the state. These could be either joint venture hospitals or greenfield projects in cities like Rajkot, Surat, Mehsana, Bhavnagar among others. The idea is to create around 1000 beds across Gujarat within the next two years. Pawar did not want to share net investment figures for the pan-Gujarat expansion, saying that things are still at a very nascent stage.

Meanwhile, Apollo Ahmedabad is all set to open its third clinic at Maninagar in the city, which will be owned and operated by Apollo unlike the other two clinics in the city that operate under the franchisee mode.

Apollo Ahmedabad has recently started the Apollo Liver clinic at its facility. The Ahmedabad Liver clinic is the third one in the Group after Chennai and Delhi. Pawar informed that have performed their first donor-relative liver transplant on July 19 and has recently started a cadaveric organ donation program in the hospital to ensure the supply of healthy livers for transplant. He admitted that while the demand for transplant among patients from Gujarat and adjoining regions like Maharashtra and Rajasthan, availability of the organ is an issue. While around 70,000 people in India die annually due to lack of access to liver transplant, only 400 such operations were conducted in the country in 2009. Estimating huge demand, Apollo plans to start its fourth clinic at Kolkata, to be followed by another two in Hyderabad and Bangalore in 2011.