Dr M Krishnan Nair: Let Kochi cancer centre be Regional Cancer Centre

KOCHI: Former director of Regional Cancer Centre (RCC) Dr M. Krishnan Nair has said that the Kochi Cancer Centre can be positioned on the lines of RCC itself and debating on the project report was unnecessary. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time,” Dr Nair told this newspaper on Thursday when his attention was drawn to the debate on the Detailed Project Report on the Kochi Cancer Centre.

“From a centre which had 2,000 patients in the beginning, today RCC has been able to treat 15,000 new patients and 2.25 lakh old and new patients yearly. The model is there,” he said. Dr Nair said that an ideal centre should be able to detect cancer early apart from giving the most appropriate treatment.

“New surgical and radiation technologies are emerging and they should be assimilated. The super-specialty cancer specialists too should be appropriately utilised by aligning them with the medical college in Kochi. There may be limited cancer cases for them and rest of their time should not go waste,” Dr Nair said.

Dr Krishnan Nair said that the best thing he got in the case of RCC was the unstinted support from two chief ministers, K. Karunakaran and E.K. Nayanar. “They left the technical aspect fully to me. When I finished the work on it in 1996, Mr Nayanar asked me to continue. That is all history,” the veteran oncologist said.