CHENNAI: MIOT Hospital is taking post-operative care to the next level with a 100-room facility, Retreat, which will house recovering patients and their family members.

Speaking at the inauguration of the facility on Saturday, MIOT's founder and managing director Dr. P.V.A. Mohandas said MIOT Retreat would provide a relaxed and healthy environment as well as protection from cross-infection during the critical recovery period.

With its hotel-like ambience and landscaped grounds, Retreat showcases the Indo-German collaboration behind MIOT through its blend of German efficiency and Indian hospitality.

Accessibility

In his keynote address at the inauguration, The Hindu 's Editor-in-Chief, N. Ram, pointed to the other essential ingredient of good healthcare: accessibility. He described the duality of India, where cutting-edge medical technology exists side by side with an "appalling neglect" of primary healthcare.

Over 300 million people lacked the means to meet their basic needs, he said. In such a scenario, "where do islands of excellence, institutions like this, fit in," he asked.

The answer, Mr. Ram said, was to maintain a healthy tension between the pursuit of excellence and the need to make it affordable.

While admitting that policy changes were needed to ensure this, he challenged individual doctors to "open the door a little bit wider."

New building

MIOT also inaugurated its new College of Nursing building on Saturday. One of MIOT's German directors, Dr. Ulrich Holz focussed on the changes in the challenges of medical education.

At a time when technology had become vital to training, diagnostics and treatment, there was still no substitute for hands-on clinical experience, he said.

Fellow director Dr. Siegfried Weller has been part of training Indian surgeons in orthopaedics for over thirty years, but his current concern is trauma care. Pointing out that traffic accidents killed a person every 13 minutes in India, he praised MIOT's efforts in this field.

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