Stage might: (from left) Dr m. Srinivas, director, AIIMS; Warangal MP Kadiyam Kavya; Deputy CM of Telangana Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka;
Dr Sudarshan Ballal, chairman, Manipal Hospitals; Dr Santosh Shetty, CEO, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital and Medical Research Institute; and Riyad Mathew, Chief Associate Editor and Director, THE WEEK | Bhanu Prakash Chandra
Courage under fire: Blade runner Shalini Saraswathi | Bhanu Prakash Chandra
Padma Shri Mohammad Ali Baig does a theatrical representation of a doctor’s life | Bhanu Prakash Chandra
Aditi Rao Hydari with fans | Bhanu Prakash Chandra
Telangana health minister C. Damodar Raja Narasimha inaugurates THE WEEK’s new web section on health | Bhanu Prakash Chandra
Rapt attention: Harkaran Singh Sahni, COO, Apollo Hospitals, Telangana, along with other guests | Bhanu Prakash Chandra
One day in 2008, Vic Gundotra, Google’s then vice-president of engineering, got a call from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. “I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon,” said Jobs. “The second O in Google does not have the right yellow gradient.” Such was his attention to detail and commitment to quality. “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it,” Jobs once said. “You will know it’s there…. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
Twenty years ago, THE WEEK was the first magazine in India to acknowledge the importance of quality in health care by ranking the best hospitals in the country. Today, it remains the only magazine to offer a credible hospital ranking. “In 20 years of its Best Hospitals survey, THE WEEK has not asked anyone for any favour,” said the magazine’s Chief Associate Editor and Director, Riyad Mathew, at THE WEEK Best Hospitals Awards 2024 in Hyderabad on December 6. “We feel it is not the right way to take such important information to our readers. We seek to make sure that the entire process is as transparent as possible, and that’s why we have here today the very best people from the finest institutions.”
At the event―themed on ‘Inspiring Quality. Inspiring Hope’―Telangana Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, Health Minister C. Damodar Raja Narasimha and Warangal MP Kadiyam Kavya gave away 24 awards across several categories, with AllMS Delhi adjudged the best hospital in the country. Both ministers, while elaborating on their plans to improve health care in the state, entreated corporate hospitals to show “the human touch” while treating poor patients. “Hospitals are at the heart of this system. They are the places where lives are saved, where hope is restored,” said Vikramarka. This was a recurring theme at the event, with AIIMS director M. Srinivas requesting THE WEEK to rate hospitals on compassion and empathy as well as on excellence and quality.
The doctors at the event emphasised that quality does not just mean what one can observe from the outside. As Henry Ford once said, quality means doing it right when no one is looking. Quality is the workers harvesting grapes in the vineyards of Burgundy to produce the best wine in the world. It is the stage crew at a Broadway production toiling behind the scenes to ensure the stage operates without a hitch. It is the Belgian women who spun exquisite lace in dark and damp underground rooms to keep the thread soft.
Quality is also the commitment of an actor like Aditi Rao Hydari to her craft, and to living life well, with joy, humility, and gratitude. “There may be darkness around, but to find the light is up to me,” she said in a session with Riyad Mathew. And quality is the resilience shown by someone like Shalini Saraswati, who lost her limbs after contracting a rare bacterial infection and is today an international athlete who holds the Asian record for being the fastest woman on blades (T62 category). “It took me 10 years to get to the Asian Para Games―10 years of waking up every single day at 5am, working out six days a week, strengthening my body, and constantly pushing its limits,” she said to rousing applause.
In many ways, the definition of quality in health care has changed over time. “When I was growing up, quality was actually the clinical excellence of the doctors,” said Dr Sudarshan Ballal, chairman, Manipal Hospitals, during a panel discussion on ‘The Pursuit of Quality’, moderated by THE WEEK’s Chief News Editor Stanley Thomas. “If doctor so and so was the best surgeon, you went to that hospital; no one really looked at anything else. It was the age of doctors who were stars. Now that has changed, and we have a whole team led by very senior functionaries, with most of them reporting to the CEO. I’m glad about this, because it is very important that we are quality-driven and process-driven, rather than individual-driven. Processes save lives, ensure patient safety, and give better outcomes and standardisation.”
Ballal reiterated that quality in health care has much to do with consistency and standardisation, and this is an area we need to work on. “If you go for an appendectomy to three different hospitals, the experience will be very different, and maybe it will be different in the same hospital on different days,” he said.
So how does a hospital like the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital and Medical Research Institute in Mumbai offer consistent care to the 35 per cent of its patients who come from outside the city and from as far as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar? The key is to offer continuity of care when it comes to pre- and post-hospitalisation, because within the hospital it is easier to ensure consistency, being NABH and JCI accredited, said Dr Santosh Shetty, the hospital’s CEO. They achieve this through several measures such as an active telemedicine setup, having their doctors conduct outreach programmes in various parts of the country, and setting up cancer centres in tier 2 and tier 3 towns of Maharashtra. “So it is a mix of technology, outreach programmes and continuous patient engagement through which we try and maintain this consistency,” he said.
In a country like India, where the gulf between the rich and the poor is large, it is also important to ensure quality care to patients from every stratum of society, said the doctors. One of the mechanisms through which they do this is cross-subsidy, where the same technology for a patient from one socioeconomic stratum is priced different for a patient from another. The other is through donations and CSR. “The CSR funding that is available today is to the tune of Rs25,000 crore, and 60 per cent of that is going into health care and education,” said Shetty. “So if you position yourself well, helping as many needy patients as possible, there are enough and more people willing to fund it.”
THE WEEK, too, believes in offering a quality product. That is why it made the best hospitals ranking part of its DNA 20 years ago. And that is why it remained dedicated to unbiased health reporting by inaugurating at the event a new web section on health―one of the five core areas it plans to focus on in the future. This is a nod to the tireless and selfless work of the doctors in this country. It is a nod to the magazine’s commitment to keeping pace in this high-speed world while staying rooted to its values. And it is a promise that in our chest of drawers, there will be no plywood on the back.