Special Feature
Cancer Treatment Comes of Age in West Bengal Woeful lack of advanced cancer treatment facilities in Bengal, but also a complete lack of faith in the existing ones forced many to travel to distant cities for affordable and quality treatments till things changed for good
It was my dream to become a cancer specialist. Right from the time I was studying for my MBBS, I knew that treating
cancer
patients
was
my
ultimate goal. As a student of MS at the Grant Medical College, Mumbai, I began visiting the Tata Memorial Centre, to Dr Sourav Datta, Director, Medica Cancer Projects
spend time with the doctors there and learn from them. After passing out, I joined the centre as an observer and was later selected as a Fellow. During my visits, I was often surprised to hear a fair amount of Bengali being spoken around me. I realised that a large number of patients (around 25 per cent) getting treated here were from Bengal. The hospital had even set up a dedicated desk with Bengali-speaking guest relation executives to guide the patients from Bengal. I began talking to these patients to find out why they felt compelled to travel to Mumbai for even the smallest of concerns. That is when I began understanding that the reason was not just the woeful lack of advanced cancer treatment facilities in Bengal, but also a complete lack of faith in the existing ones. This disturbed me, and when I discussed this with my mentor at Tata Memorial Prof Pankaj Chaturvedi, he told me that I should think of going back to Kolkata after a while and work towards improving the cancer care facility there. The opening of Tata Medical Centre at
32
February 2022
Rajarhat in Kolkata in 2011 was a giant leap in the region’s cancer treatment scenario. Though the hospital was not a unit of Mumbai’s Tata Memorial, the name Tata is associated with advanced cancer care the world over, and for patients in Kolkata, they finally had a facility in their backyard that they could trust. In 2015, inspired by our teachers at Tata Memorial, a group of oncologists trained at the Centre, who belong to this part of the country decided to take the significant step of moving to Kolkata to set up a facility focussed on ‘organ-specific cancer care’, the modern method of treating the cancer patients. Other metro cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, started this organspecific cancer treatment long back, however, it was missing in Kolkata so far. Unfortunately, we failed to find any backers for this project among the big corporates in healthcare in the city initially. A relatively new cancer facility in Howrah finally agreed to our terms and our cancer care journey in this state began. Coincidentally, around this time a gradual change was taking place in the city in the area of cancer treatment with various healthcare units in the corporate, trust and government sectors beginning to beef up their cancer care facilities. It was an encouraging trend, as not just new cancer centres
