Monday 18 / November / 2024
Muscat: Apollo Medical Centre has been upgraded to a hospital, after getting clearance from the Ministry of Health for a hospital status.
The upgraded hospital will be officially inaugurated on April 27.
“The immediate priority will be to add more clinical bandwidth to the existing set up,” V T Saileswaran, managing director of the Apollo Hospital Muscat told the Times of Oman.
The Apollo Hospital Muscat currently has 25 specialised in-house doctors and eight super specialty visiting consultants from Apollo India, for Neurology, Oncology and Orthopaedics.
“The upgraded facility will introduce new specialties, such as a hearing aid service, thalassemia clinic for children, gastroenterology, bariatric surgery, urology, full range of orthopaedic surgeries, including joint replacement and arthroscopy. We are looking at having a reproductive medicine clinic, a paediatric cardiac clinic and medical screening services,” added Saileswaran. “The Apollo Hospital will offer specific and updated clinical bandwidth and we will not let down (people’s) expectations.”
The Hospital will adopt a phased approach in expansion and “may be in the near future, it will have presence across the board.” The hospital will also be open to a clinical alliance in the meantime.
Saileswaran said the Apollo Hospitals Group in India remains a preferred provider for high-end healthcare for the people of the Sultanate and this has been the case for over two decades now. “As far as Apollo in Oman is concerned, we are reaching our first decade of the first ever Apollo in the Sultanate. We felt the need for change, especially in terms of changing and challenging disease patterns and hence upgraded the Apollo Medical Centre to again, the first ever Apollo Hospital in Middle East.”
Referring to the development of the healthcare sector in Oman over the years, he said it is rated by world bodies, such as the World Health Organisation as one of the best in the world. “I guess we are just second to Canada in terms of a social healthcare system. All the credit goes to the visionary leaders we have in Oman who have made Oman’s healthcare delivery model, which is a benchmark for many others,” noted Saileswaran.
Talking about the role of private hospitals, he said healthcare is a shared responsibility and there is a need for proper integration of private and public sectors. In the Sultanate, it is even more defined as most of the tertiary level care is with the government and the private sector is mostly focused on the elective side or secondary healthcare.
On the Apollo Hospital Muscat’s ties with Indian hospital chain, he said; “We are the Apollo subset in Oman and they remain our mentors with a track record of treating over 40m patients. The entire clinical pathway, visiting consultants, clinical quality monitors are all connected to Apollo India and we just do not have to integrate, the connect is always on.”
