Get treated now, pay later incentive at PSH - Founder

Fijians will no longer need to travel all the way to India and spend around $50,000 to get bypass surgery, thanks to Pacific Specialist Healthcare Hospital (PSH), which now has a fully-fledged cardiology department running in Legalega, Nadi.

The state-of-the-art 100-bed hospital conducted its first open-heart surgery last week on 61-year-old Kusum Lata of Natabua.

While it took the management of the hospital close to 15 months of meticulous planning and procuring of advanced medical equipment, the entire team at PSH is on cloud nine following their first open heart surgery procedure that was executed successfully in Nadi by a team of experienced cardiology surgeons and specialists on Monday (November 11).

Pacific Specialist Healthcare Hospital says Lata went through a delicate surgery known as “Coronary Artery Bypass Graft” (CABG), that was carried out by a team of highly trained Cardio Thoracic specialists.

They say the team carried out a “triple” graft procedure without any complications and the patient was subsequently discharged on Friday – just five days after her operation as she was fit enough and in high spirits to be released.

Lata says she can’t believe that just after five days of having an operation, she was going home to reunite with her family.

The 61-year-old says she wishes to thank the management and staff of PSH for taking good care of her and highly recommends them to anyone who is going through the pain that she went through prior to her successful surgery. She also says that doctors in Lautoka had told her that due to her complications, they could not perform a triple-bypass surgery locally.

Lata adds she was told to raise $50,000 to visit India with an accompanying relative or caretaker.

She says at that point, she had lost all hope but was quickly referred to PSH by a relative.

The Natabua resident says she came and enquired and was told that her timing was just right because the brand-new cardiology department had just been set up and is now fully functional and ready to roll.

She says she believes it was God’s plan, and she happened to be at the right place at the right time and is so happy to learn that the total cost would be only $12,000 – a fraction of what her family would have spent in India.

Lata’s daughter-in-law Amrita Devi could not hold back her happiness and thanked everyone involved in making the operation successful.

Devi acknowledged and thanked the entire management and staff of PSH for treating her mother-in-law at such an affordable cost and she is o grateful to God for showing them the path leading to this great and modern hospital in Nadi.

She says she is so happy and completely lost for words.

Former president of Fiji College of General Practitioners (FCGP), Dr Ram Raju says normally it would have taken ten days for an open-heart surgery patient to be fit enough to go home but Kusum Lata’s surgery was carried out so smoothly that she showed great signs of quick recovery and that enabled the management of the Hospital to allow an early release.

Dr Raju says he would like to congratulate PSH for conducting the first-ever open-heart surgery for an adult patient at a private facility in Nadi.

He says Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) is one of the most common heart surgeries for patients who have had heart attacks.

He also says Coronary Artery Bypass Graft already started in Fiji at Colonial War Memorial Hospital (CWM) as well as Lautoka Hospital by a team of cardiac specialists from India and this is the first such case at PSH in Nadi at a modest cost of $12,000.

Meanwhile, PSH Founder and Director Parvish Kumar has offered a, “get treated now, pay later”, incentive for patients who are going through difficult financial situations.

He says the important thing is to save a precious life, and, in that case, money becomes a secondary matter.

Kumar says their priority is to save the patient, and they can work out an acceptable plan to pay them later in instalments to ease the respective patient’s financial burdens.

He adds this will be screened on a case-by-case basis, and they will definitely go out of their way to help patients who genuinely deserve the offer.