Day 20: Everyone in Kolkata

21^st August, Thursday

We went to SSKM today, which was a government hospital in Kolkata. SSKM turned out to be much different from Osmania General Hospital (Hyderabad) in terms of patient volume and quality of education and ranked very high as a tertiary care government hospital. It had 300 beds just for cardiology, was well equipped and had the highest number of pacemaker implantations in the country. 

Outside of SSKM Hospital Cardiology deparment

Dr. Shoumik, a 3^rd year resident explained to us about how hard it was to get into SSKM to post doc in cardiology and that it was regarded highly for its education programs. It was also very interesting to learn about ‘Fair Price Shops’ where all medical devices could be availed at a whopping 67% subsidy from the government of West Bengal. 

Later that day, Erin, Jay and Adam observed the implantation procedure for a dual-chamber pacemaker at Medica Hospital that Dr. Banerjee had kindly invited the team to observe. The facilities there were state-of-the art (seemed comparable to those at Hopkins) and the procedure was very efficiently done with all the best practices. An interesting thing to note was that this procedure was done under local anesthesia with no sedation whatsoever!

Jay and Adam in their purple scrubs before the procedure.

Our day ended with a reunion party, where everybody from CBID in Kolkata got together for dinner and drinks. This included the Brady Brunch, the mHealth team (Brian, March, Sriram, and Trent), Anant, two our TAs; Kevin and Michael, Dr. Acharya, Aditya, Dr. Saha, Adam, and Idara (the 4th member of the Medtronic team who had arrived earlier in the day). It was our last day with everyone together in India as Michael and Kevin left that evening for a tour in Northern India (Darjeeling and other places) and Anant was heading back to Baltimore early the next morning. We all enjoyed out time talking about our projects and experiences in India thus far.

Day 18 - Hum Kolkata aa gaye!

August 19th 2014

August 19th was an early morning for Team Brady and Adam. We all woke up around 2:30am to catch a cab to the airport for our 6:30am flight to Kolkata. Kesavan was leaving later in the afternoon from Hyderabad, so he stayed back at the hotel and slept in.

Throughout our time with Kesavan we have been writing down all the funny quotes he says. Since this is our last post with Kesavan, we figured we should share our list of Kesavan quotes:

"It's okay, the rat was scrubbed in"

"So is boneless chicken like seedless grapes, they are just born without them?"

When someone asked why Kesavan was so serious: "I'm serious cause I'm eating serious food"

"I have 2 's'. It's a Samsung. I'm not up to 5s's yet"

Hum Kolkata aa gaye! (We arrived in Kolkata)

Our flight arrived in Kolkata around 8:30am and after the quickest exit from the airport and luggage retrieval (under 20 minutes) we made our way outside to the cars waiting for us. Two hours and lots of Kolkata traffic later, we arrived at the Tolley Club hotel. We had a meeting scheduled for 12:00 am at
Medica Superspecialty hospital, so after a quick turnaround change and a carb-loaded snack, we were ready for our first day in Kolkata!

Quick snack before heaidng out for the day

At Medica we met up with Dr. Acharya who came with us to meet Dr Banerjee (leading Senior Interventional Cardiologist, and his colleagues; Dr Moitre and Dr Goupta. We had a quick introductory meeting with Dr Banerjee, followed by further educational sessions from Dr Moitre and Dr Goupta. During this conversations we also had some time to speak with patients, patient families, a medical device distributor and medical device rep.

Maddie speaking with a patient and their family

Shruthi speaking to a device rep

After the educational sessions, Dr. Goupta led us to the outpatient clinic to see the diagnostic tests and facilities at Medica. Adam volunteered to try out the Holter monitor and the nurses and assistants helped guide us through their process for diagnosing bradyarrhythmias.

Adam getting the Holter monitor put on while Shruthi was taking notes

Exhausted from the travelling of the day, Adam, Erin, and Maddie took a car back to the Tolley Club to get some sleep. Meanwhile, Shruthi, Dhananjay, and Dr. Acharya headed over to a secondary hospital, Apex hospital, to see their facilities and speak with the cardiologists and GPs there. It was definitely a long first day in Kolkata, but we found out some really great insights and spoke to a number of key stakeholders for our projet.