“The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity,” writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy had once said. And Dr Ramesh Kancharla, Founder, Rainbow Hospitals, lives by the same philosophy. That is why his team believes in attracting people who come into the field of medicine not because it’s a job, but a true calling for paediatric healthcare.
TAKING OFF RESOLUTELY
In 1999, when Dr Ramesh returned to Hyderabad from the United Kingdom after specialising in gastroenterology, liver disease and transplantation, he decided that Hyderabad needed a multi-speciality children’s hospital. Then he, along with some of his friends, started raising money and by the end of the year, had collected enough to set up a 50-bed children’s hospital. Dr Ramesh and his friends collectively invested Rs 1.5 crore and an equal amount of loaned money.
“I had spent about eight years in the UK but when I came back, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a suitable place to display our skills. I started looking around for similar work ethics — and some of our colleagues came together to start a children’s hospital. That’s how Rainbow Hospitals came into existence on November 14, 1999. We started the hospital with a lot of focus on children’s intensive care services and unit intensive care. We are a team of specialists. I am a paediatric gastroenterologist, my colleagues were nephrologists and periodic hematologists,” explains Dr Ramesh.
THE TURBULENT CLIMB
Talking about the trials of the journey, he shares, “When I came here, all of us were new; the concept was new. Starting a hospital at that point of time was a high-investment project. For the first two years, we struggled to survive. We had disturbing moments, thinking about how we would pay the bank loans or the salaries. We even thought that we will give it one last shot for one year and then go back to UK.” However, that one year period changed their course and they have never looked back since. Rainbow now operates in Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Bengaluru and New Delhi. “Our idea is to set up paediatric speciality hospitals across the country,’’ says Dr Kancharla, who worked at the King’s College Hospital and the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London before returning to Hyderabad.
Coming from a small village in Nellore district with an agricultural background, the lifestyle inculcated the habits of hard work, honesty and sincerity into Dr Ramesh’s being, early on in life. And so, he founded the hospital with the promise that no child from other states and districts would be denied care.
“By 2005, we started a lot of clinics outside Hyderabad every Sunday. We started going to Vijayawada, Rajahmundry, Nanded in Maharashtra, etc. We also started going to districts personally to get the child to Hyderabad in an ambulance,” says Dr Ramesh.
Then in 2006, the team realised the need for a bigger space and renovated it to a 150-bed hospital. “We also started prenatal services as an integral part of the hospital,” he says.
For all of the growth and technological leaps at Rainbow Hospitals, what has made working here most rewarding is the connection with the kids, he feels. “The bonds formed, the battles endured together, the victories savoured over all these years are the best,” says Dr Ramesh.
EXPLORING NEW INITIATIVES
Talking about his exciting new venture, Dr Ramesh reveals that ‘BirthRight by Rainbow’ will offer comprehensive care for pregnant mothers and newborns — pre- and post-delivery, foetal medicine and neo-natal care. “The services would include pregnancy counselling, child birth preparation classes, breast-feeding support, post-partum care, etc. We have taken a lot of feedback from parents and incorporated all of it in our new centre. We have divided it into different areas — babies born at the hospital will be kept separately because they are infection-free, then babies coming with infections have separate ICUs and those that require high-end care have a separate area. We have created a few rooms like ICUs that are called family-centric rooms where a new mother can be with the child from day one. We will also have bone marrow transplant facilities in the new centre,” says Dr Ramesh.
The team at Rainbow acknowledge that the demand for their services, particularly critical care services, continues to grow constantly. “People need services that we provide. We need to be there for every child, every time,” states Dr Ramesh.
Even though he has undertaken one of the busiest professions in the world, this Mahesh Babu fan somehow finds the time to watch all of his movies, over and again. Dr Ramesh concluded the conversation by saying, “We believe in a full-time system. We don’t have the concept of home clinics, so that after work we are dedicated to our families. That’s our success mantra.”
An Interesting Anecdote:
In 2007, when we renovated the hospital, we invited the then chief minister, the late Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy. When he came and saw the hospital, he said, ‘Are you sure it’s going to work?’ Since then he called me often to ask whether we were able to pay the loans.
People think that our centre is a five-star or seven-star place. It definitely is a world-class facility but when you look at it, 90 per cent of the revenue has been used for the robust system and only 10 per cent has been spent on the luxury part. We are working on the hospital today so that it lasts for the next two or three decades to come.
Other passions:
I love to catch up with friends when free! I listen to Telugu ghazals and love watching movies. I love watching Mahesh Babu’s movies at least twice. I have been observing him as an actor for the last 15 years and I give my feedback to Namrata. It’s more of a family connect which makes me watch the movies for a second time.
