Sankara Eye Foundation’s Founder on the Progress of their Hospitals in India

This summer, which was spent in India, had me visiting our hospitals in Kanpur, Coimbatore, Guntur, and Bangalore and interacting with the leadership and the staff.

By Murali Krishnamurthy

Every penny that Sankara Eye Foundation (SEF), USA, raises goes towards the treatment of visually challenged people in India. I spent this summer in India visiting our hospitals in Kanpur, Coimbatore, Guntur, and Bangalore and interacting with the leadership and the staff. One glance at the patients being evaluated at eye camps, treated at the hospitals, given counseling, food, and excellent post-operative care makes you wonder if any of it is real?  Yes, it is very real and exemplary in the field of eye care.

The first visit was to the Kanpur hospital. The HR in charge, Jay Prakash, enthusiastically greeted us by telling the chairman, “We must eradicate curable blindness and do whatever it takes to get there.”

SEF India runs on its core principle of maintaining the same standards and quality of service at all its hospitals. The same quality of service is accorded to both, paid and free patients. The Kanpur hospital has already completed 9000 free eye surgeries and it is working hard to get on par with Guntur in terms of excellence. The staff is not just hardworking, but compassionate and loving and has often been praised by patients. For this, kudos to Dr. Ramani, Dr. Radha Ramani, Bharath, Dr. Kaushik and the staff of SEF India.

Kanakaraj is responsible for paid patient care and business development across SEF India. An asset to the organization, his addition helped Sankara grow.  He was the Unit head of Kanpur before this assignment and the Unit Head, Business Development, Kanpur is Ritender Singh Tomar.  Kanakaraj is very capable and is working hard to get Anand and Ludhiana hospitals to a great level.

Coimbatore was our next stop, and we stayed on the premises in a cottage. The atmosphere was surreal in the morning with the birds chirping and music from the temple waking us up. Being the headquarters, it has been a benchmark for all hospitals and also tried to pioneer the implementation of new technologies for eye treatment and eye care.  It has been under the constant watch of the founders of SEF, India, Ramani and Radha Ramani and has excelled under their care. Dr. Imtiaz Ahmad in Bharath’s team is in charge of outreach (free patient care).  The unit heads for free patient care at the other hospitals talk highly of Ahmad.

Guntur, among all our hospitals, is a busy one. At this time, the third phase of work is being done in the hospital which includes The National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers certificate. A resident doctor at the Sankara Academy of Vision mentioned his experience with the quality of service. He was confident that he wouldn’t get the kind of service offered by Sankara elsewhere in the country in the field of Ophthalmology.

Our final stop on this visit was the Bangalore Hospital. Kaushik, as the President of the Medical Administration, is trying amazing things to scale the quality of service at this hospital.

Bangalore is doing pioneering work—they recently installed the Simpliflow (Quick medics) system at Bangalore unit as an initiative towards the efficient outpatient management and superior customer satisfaction. Some of the salient features of this system include display queue information on a television, analyze queue data powerful intelligence to provide meaningful insights about customers, patient tracking mechanism, managing customer flow through algorithmic queue engine, and tracking average consultation time. This feature has been useful and will now be implemented at the other hospitals.

The Sankara Academy of Vision is ready and the work has started.  At the academy, there is a good training program for ophthalmologists, providing them world class training and diplomas. Bangalore is also the first hospital to get an NABH certification for the operation theaters.  Now there will be only one bed per chamber and this will improve the quality of treatment and lend credibility to our efforts. They are also taking the lead in rehabilitative work.

Jennifer enthusiastically gave our chairman a tour of the facilities—use of braille, kitchen redesign for the women who cannot see etc. are among the few things that have been adopted to provide quality service.  At this facility, the sight of developmentally limited children being trained to see better will bring you to tears. She also showed a bus fitted with the above rehabilitative facilities and this will enable them to reach out for more rehabilitative work. The trip was worthwhile having interacted with patients, seeing the work done and the progress SEF India has made.