MBBS programme to be expected to roll out by IIT Kharagpur with initial capacity of 50 students for the academic year 2021-2022. It will consist of OPD services with 400-bed super speciality hospital.
The hospital will work on a cross-subsidy model in a not-for-profit model. As per news report, 10% of the beds would be free and 65% of the beds would be charged as per the rates in the central and state health insurance schemes.
Professor Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, the officiating director, said: “We plan to start the OPD services this year. By early next year, we plan to start the indoor facilities in the first phase with 400 beds. Once the hospital is operational, we plan to roll out the MBBS curriculum as per MCI guidelines.”
“The plan is the second phase is to scale it up to a 750-bed hospital and increase the intake capacity to 100 MBBS students,” Bhattacharyya added. He said, “IIT Kharagpur will award the MBBS and postgraduate degrees, chart out the curriculum and manage the academic affairs while the day-to-day hospital management will be run by the special purpose vehicle floated under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. The hospital’s board of directors will be headed by the IIT Kharagpur director and will include senior IIT faculty.”
The director said, “Traditionally in IITs, we first set up postgraduate departments. Once these are fully functional, we set up their undergraduate schools. But in medicine, we learnt, it must be the reverse. We need to introduce MBBS first and then offer postgraduate degrees. He added that health care data sciences or data analytics would also be one of the primary thrust areas as IIT ventures deeper into medical research. The institute is also setting up mobile hospital units to cater to the immediate neighborhood anticipating a heavy rush of people to the new hospital.