Sankara Eye Care Institutions (SECI) will be investing Rs.440 crore over 8 years to set up 11 hospital across the country by 2020. This will take the total number of eye hospitals to 20.
The initiative is a part of the eye care major’s Project Vision 20/20 by 2020. The new 11 centres will benefit one million eye disorder patients.
The investment required for each facility is Rs.22 crore and funding has been mainly by philanthropists or partnerships with state governments and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and corporate houses, Dr RV Ramani, founder and managing trustee, Sankara Eye Care Institutions- India, stated at a press conclave here.
The ophthalmology care major has also partnered with the government of Nigeria to set up a facility at Abuja which is expected to be 5 times the cost of an Indian facility at Rs.110 crore. But partnerships with Sankara Foundation USA, Sankara Foundation, London, Mission for Vision, SightSavers International and Robert Bosch Foundation, we should see the facility come up, Dr Ramani added.
In a bid to function as a self sustained institutions with minimal dependency on external funding, SECI has been looking at keeping costs low to generate revenues. With 80 per cent of services rendered free of cost, revenues from the 20 per cent paid-patients help to cross subsidize its ‘no payment’ model to economically backward patients. The management strategy revolves around reducing expenditure outlay, utilize economies-of-scale and focus on innovative technology that helps the Institution to perform high volume procedures at lesser costs. Therefore all new hospitals which are being planned would be self sustainable within five years of its commissioning, stated Dr Ramani.
The 11 new hospitals are slated to come up in the capital cities of states including Punjab, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. The facility at Chandigarh will be commissioned by the year end, he stated.
Currently, SECI runs 9 hospitals and has performed 7.72 lakh surgeries. The Bangalore facility funded by Infosys Foundation and Jaslok Foundation among others is a 225-bed facility with 220 beds for economically unaffordable patients.
In Karnataka, there is a centre at Shimoga to cater to the northern parts of the state. The Gift of Vision programme designed for elderly patients and Nanna Kannu for children it has treated 1,70 lakh patients annually. Through the National Association for Blind (NAB), District Blindness Control Society, Mission for Vision and SightSavers it is working to eliminate blindness. So far SECI has been able to save 22 million lives through preventive and curative eye care.
Going by the presence of several eye care chain centres coming across India, Dr Ramani stated that its key strength is the ability to achieve 98 per cent over World Health Organization’s 90 per cent set standard for success in the area of quality of Visual Acuity indicator to assess the benefit of a surgical intervention.