How To Get More For Less? Production Heart Surgery

The Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore is the largest hospitals specialising in cardiac surgery in the world. It carries out over £6,000 operations per year, half on children. Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, a world leading centre for children’s heart operations managed to undertake less than 10% of that number last year.

The hospital works on the premise that bigger is better. By carrying out huge volumes of operations the cost of each procedure can be substantially reduced. A complex heart operation at the hospital can be carried out for as little as £1,140 although the hospital is attempting to reduce this to less than £600. The same apportion in the US or the UK may lose up to 20 to 30 times as much

The simple but revolutionary idea means that instead of building small hospitals with only a hundred or so beds, surgery is in fact carried out in super hospitals with over ten times as many beds. Despite carrying out the huge numbers of operations death rates at the Bangalore Hospital are comparable or better than those in the UK or the US.

The hospital, which is a private venture will shortly be opening a similar super hospital in the Cayman Islands where it hopes to attract patients from Florida and other Southern States who do not have access to full healthcare.

On the Prime Ministers recent trip to India Vince Cable, the Business Secretary who was travelling with the Prime Minister called the Cardiac Hospital as well as its two sister hospitals, one specialising in orthopaedics and the other in Cancer treatment “quite inspirational”.

Could this signal a new direction for the NHS?