Health City Cayman Islands Founder One of Four Outstanding Doctors Featured by BBC
Dr. Shetty, also chairman of India’s Narayana Health Group, reported a scholarship program his organization set up was trying to get children excited about medicine. In addition, he was hoping to help build medical schools either in the Cayman Islands or elsewhere in the region, “so that once we have medical schools when the kids start seeing these youngsters with stethoscopes on their neck, I think the kids will get excited, so this is what we want to do at some point in time.”
Featured in a four-part BBC TV documentary, “The Surgeon’s Cut”, which premiered globally on Netflix on December 9, 2020, Dr. Shetty spoke to reporters after the premiere and lamented that surgery was “the orphan child of the public health systems in developing countries,” because hard-pressed governments focused on (communicable diseases such as) malaria, tuberculosis and the human immunodeficiency virus, which kill about 3 million people every year. However, he contended, “lack of access to safe surgery kills 70 million people.”
The episode highlighting Dr. Shetty is entitled “Heart & Soul” and described him as “a renowned cardiac surgeon and founder of India’s Narayana Health”, one of the largest medical centers in the world. The “Surgeon’s Cut” follows Dr. Shetty as he treats patients from all walks of life, prioritizing low-cost, accessible health care while he and his team together perform upwards of 30 surgeries a day.
Too often, people belittle the importance of heart surgery on children but, he averred continued hospital visits could bankrupt a family in developing countries where the inability to pay health care costs was one of the most common causes of bankruptcy. So, his provision of low cost cardiac surgery, he reported, made him a person who is “a heart surgeon by profession, but my job is putting a price tag on human life.”
Dr. Shetty's aim was to make health care affordable and accessible to everyone with more emphasis placed on surgery because the demand was so great. Patients in India, for example, required about 65 million surgeries a year but only about 25 million surgeries were performed, leaving a shortage of 40 million.
He declared “if the solution is not affordable, it is not a solution,” and he added, “there is no point talking about advances in heart surgery or cancer care or any of those if you can't afford it.”
Affordability and profitability is possible, according to Dr. Shetty who, as Mother Theresa’s physician, was inspired to accelerate progress in the provision of complicated surgeries for families with little or no ways of paying and by showing the world how to build medical institutions which operate as for-profit centers while at the same time taking care of the poor.
A lot of skepticism he faced because of the tendency to equate low cost with a cheap, substandard product evaporated when Dr. Shetty was featured in a cover story in The Wall Street Journal. He revealed his hospitals, accredited by Joint Commission International, many times were doing heart surgery for about one quarter the price in the United States (in the Cayman Islands); and in India, at one-tenth of the price in the United States at a comparable quality health care institution.
Health City Cayman Islands’ Clinical Director, Dr. Binoy Chattuparambil, concurred Dr. Shetty’s revolutionary provision of high-quality, accessible health care at Health City Cayman Islands is saving young lives in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.
Shomari Scott, Chief Business Officer at Health City Cayman Islands, said, “To be one of only four surgeons in the entire world featured in this documentary is testament to the unique and ground-breaking nature of Dr. Shetty’s approach to medicine. Never before has anyone focused on providing the best possible quality at the lowest possible price while saving thousands of lives in the process.”
About Health City Cayman Islands
Health City Cayman Islands, the vision of renowned heart surgeon and humanitarian Dr. Devi Shetty, is supported by Narayana Health, one of India’s largest private health care systems. Health City, only the second hospital in the Caribbean to receive Joint Commission International's "hospital accreditation", provides compassionate, high-quality, affordable health care services in a world-class, comfortable, patient-centered environment. Offering health care to local, regional and international patients, Health City Cayman Islands delivers excellence in adult and pediatric cardiology, cardiac surgery, cardiac electrophysiology, medical oncology, orthopedics, sports medicine, gastrointestinal, hepatic, pancreatic, biliary and bariatric surgery, neurology, interventional neurology and neuro-diagnostics, neurosurgery, minimally invasive spine surgery, gynecology, urology, colorectal surgery, dental, sleep lab and pulmonology services. For further information, visit www.healthcitycaymanislands.com.
Christina Trumbach, Marketing & Communication Manager
Health City Cayman Islands
+1 (345) 526-2203
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