India’s biggest cancer centre to launch OPD service in Lucknow today

LUCKNOW: Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will launch the OPD service at the Super Specialty Cancer Institute (SSCI) in the city on Tuesday. When the institute gets fully functional with its 1,250 beds, the SSCI would be the biggest cancer centre in the country.

It will be bigger than the National Cancer Institute of Jhajjar (Haryana) which has 700 beds. It will be twice the size of Tata Memorial Institute of Mumbai which has about 650 beds and it will be four times of Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute.
On Tuesday, SSCI’s main OPD block will be dedicated by the chief minister in a virtual ceremony in the presence of Union defence minister and Lucknow MP Rajnath Singh.Minister of medical education Suresh Khanna and his deputy Sandeep Singh will also be present at the event which marks the beginning of out-patient services like day care, radiation oncology and surgical oncology. After this, 750 beds would be made functional in the first phase and 500 in the second.
“Besides being a benchmark in patient care by providing state-of-the-art and affordable services, SSCI will serve as the apex state cancer institute for capacity building. It will also start a population-based cancer registry for the state capital,” said additional chief secretary, medical education, Dr Rajneesh Dube.
The institute will follow the DMG format. Under this, specialists of all disciplines sit in a room along with the patient who sits just opposite them as is witnessed in high profile interviews. Experts listen to medical issues of the patient and finalise the treatment line.
Government insiders revealed that CM Yogi Adityanath wants the facility to get functional at the earliest to save scores of poor people in the state from selling their assets and belongings to afford cancer treatment in big cities.
The facility will not only benefit people in UP but also those from Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. Notably, one in three patients reporting at the Indian Council of Medical Research’s national cancer registry is from these three states.
Numbers suggest that UP desperately needed a state-of-the-art facility with all services under one roof. A 2017 report on cancer showed that UP was among the worst-affected states. In 2016, Uttar Pradesh saw 6.7 lakh of the 39 lakh cancer cases reported in the country.
Likewise, a Lancet analysis of 9.7 million deaths reported in India in 2017 investigated reasons for disability-adjusted life years. It noted that UP stood prominently among states accounting for 44% of India’s cancer burden. The others were northeastern states, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Haryana, Assam, Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.
Locally too, the centre would be of great help. Long waiting lists at the available centres like KGMU, SGPGI and RML Institute speak for the dire need.