The state government has allotted 7.2 acres in New Town to Devi Shetty’s Narayana Hrudayalaya to set up a greenfield hospital.
The Bangalore-headquartered group will set up a 1,000-bed hospital on the land with an outpatient department that can treat 5,000 to 7,000 patients in a day.
The hospital, a Rs 1,000-crore project, will be part of the Narayana Health chain run by Shetty, its chairman.
“Allotment of the land has been done to you for setting up health institution,” the letter issued by Hidco said.
The plot is near the Biswa Bangla Convention Centre in New Town.
“I am grateful to chief minister Mamata Banerjee and urban development minister Firhad Hakim for allotting the land. We are planning to start construction in less than six months. The project will be completed in two phases,” Devi Shetty told The Telegraph on Wednesday.
“We are planning to make the first phase operational in two years with a soft launch in one-and-a-half years.”
State government officials said the land was put up for auction last year and was allotted to Narayana Hrudayalaya Ltd, which was the highest bidder.
“The hospital will have cutting-edge facilities like all organ transplants. It will be a digital hospital,” said Shetty.
The group, he said, has a large pool of doctors being trained who could be brought here for the new hospital. The NH group has around 50 hospitals, clinics and cardiac treatment centres across the country.
“If one has to bring down the cost of treatment in private hospitals, then 100 or 150-bed hospitals are not the solution. We need hospitals with more beds,” said Shetty.
“A CT scan machine has the capacity to do 200 scans a day. But in a small hospital, only five to 10 scans are done. This pushes up charges to make the hospital viable.”
But if the CT scan machine can be used for 100 patients in a day, he said, "the cost would come down".
Shetty had announced the hospital project at the last Bengal Global Business Summit. The hospital will also function as an academic institution and train postgraduate doctors and nurses.
It will have a large number of ICUs, said a Narayana official.
The expansion of OPD care will increase the chances of timely detection of disease and arresting its progression, thereby reducing the need for tests later, said the official.
There are a few other greenfield hospital projects in the pipeline, including two by Belle Vue Clinic in New Town.