The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh is all set to launch the OPD service at the Super Specialty Cancer Institute (SSCI) today, in Lucknow. The SSCI will be tagged as the biggest cancer centre in the country, once it gets operational. This institute is equipped with 1,250 beds and it will be bigger than the National Cancer Institute of Jhajjar (Haryana), which has the capacity of 700 beds. SSCI will be twice the size of the Tata Memorial Institute of Mumbai, which has about 650 beds and will be four times larger than Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute. The Chief Minister will inaugurate the SSCI’s main OPD block in a virtual ceremony, in the presence of the Union Defence Minister.
UP accounted for 44% of India’s cancer burden
The out-patient services like day care, radiation oncology and surgical oncology will commence at the SSCI and after this, 750 beds would be made functional in the first phase and 500 in the second. The Additional Chief Secretary, Medical Education, mentioned in a statement, “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.”
The institute will follow the DMG format. Pertaining to this mode, specialists of all disciplines, will sit in a room along with the patients sitting opposite to them, as is witnessed in high profile interviews. The experts will listen to the medical issues of the patients and finalize the treatment procedure. The Chief Minister state that he wants the facility to become functional at the earliest to save scores of poor people in the state from selling their assets to afford cancer treatment in big cities. The facility will not only benefit people in Uttar Pradesh but also those from Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
One in three patients, reporting at the Indian Council of Medical Research’s national cancer registry, is from these three states. The numbers suggest that Uttar Pradesh desperately needed a state-of-the-art facility with all services under one roof and hence, SCCI has been instituted.
In 2016, Uttar Pradesh observed 6.7 lakh of the 39 lakh cancer cases reported in the country. As per a 2017 report on cancer, the state was among the worst-affected ones. Uttar Pradesh stood prominently among all the other states, accounting for 44% of India’s cancer burden. The others were north-eastern states, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Haryana, Assam, Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.
