When I did a 100 heart operations in 1989, I knew it was possible to start a revolution in cardiac surgery: Dr Devi Shetty – India Today

When Devi Shetty was just 14 years old, something remarkable happened in the world of medicine. Christiaan Barnard, a South African cardiac surgeon, performed the worlds first human-to-human heart transplant operation, and the patient lived for 18 days. Shetty, who was studying in a school in Mangalore, Karnataka, was so awed by the development that he decided he would become a heart surgeon. That ambition was reinforced by the respect he saw in peoples eyes for doctors in his town. They looked at doctors as if they were gods, he recalls.

His mind made up, Shetty did his MBBS and a post-graduate degree in surgery from the Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore. But with no training facilities and infrastructure for heart surgery in India, he went to England to do his FRCS and trained as a cardiac surgeon in two hospitals there. He worked extraordinarily hard and soon endeared himself to the faculty for his dedication and skills. They wanted him to stay on. But his wife Shakuntala was, as he puts it, counting the days before she could come back to India. He too was keen to get back.

When they returned, Shetty found it difficult to get a job, as heart surgery was still in its infancy in the country. Finally, the B.M. Birla Foundation, which had just set up a hospital in Calcutta, offered him a job as a cardiac surgeon in 1989. He took it up with alacrity and soon made a name for himself by performing the first neonatal heart surgery in the country on a nine-day-old baby. Compared to the facilities he had in England, Shetty found conducting surgeries in India then tremendously stressful because of the woeful lack of hospital support structure for complex surgeries. He recalls that most people would go to the extent of writing their wills before undergoing a heart surgery then. For him, the turning point of his life was in 1989, when, he says, I completed 100 heart operations without a single fatality. It was the happiest day of my life and I knew that it was possible to start a revolution in cardiac surgery in the country.

It was around that time that he was called in to treat Mother Teresa and was deeply influenced by her presence. Shetty got to know how famous she was when he was inundated with calls from all over the world, including the White House, enquiring about her condition. People were ready to airlift her to the US for treatment. But Mother Teresa ignored the worldwide attention she was getting and insisted on being treated by him. He found her to be an extremely simple person and confessed, As a doctor, for me to accept someone else of flesh and blood to be like god is very difficult. But I found divinity in her presence.

When she was being treated by him, she made it a point to accompany him on his rounds. On one occasion, she saw him examining a baby who was born with a hole in the heart, on whom Shetty had successfully operated. Mother Teresa told him, When children suffer from heart problems at birth, god thought, okay, there is a problem and someone has to fix it. He thought he would send people like you to do so. Shettys eyes turn moist when he recounts the incident and he says, It was the best job description of a heart surgeon I had heard. I was really touched. When somebody like her says there is a higher purpose, your whole approach to work changes.

Shetty found his true calling when he decided that he would provide world-class health services at a cost the poor could afford. He made it a point to never turn down a surgery because a person couldnt afford to pay for it. Unless they volunteered, he also never charged parents who brought their babies to be treated for complications of the heart. He was touched that when he decided to leave Kolkata to set up a hospital in 1996, the chief minister of West Bengal called him and offered a large plot of land to build a hospital at a tenth of the market rate. It made him believe the scriptures which said that cosmic forces come together to conspire and make good things happen.

When he shifted to Bengaluru, Shetty made his dream of providing affordable quality medicare to the millions a reality. In 2001, he set up a 280-bed heart hospital called Narayana Hrudalaya that provided some of the lowest-cost heart surgeries available in the country by bringing about economies of scale. He simultaneously started a unique micro health insurance scheme for the farmers of Karnataka, where they contributed Rs 5 every month which entitled them to get any surgery done free at designated hospitals in the state. The Karnataka government-backed the scheme, known as Yeshasvini, by agreeing to reinsure it. Over 4 million people have enrolled in the scheme, which has recently been merged with the central governments Ayushman Bharat health insurance plan.

Dr Devi Shetty(first from left) with Mother Teresa, who was his patient in Kolkata

Meanwhile, Shetty has expanded Narayana Health, as it is now known, to a chain of multi-speciality hospitals across 18 cities in the country and one in the Cayman Islands. It now has 21 hospitals and six exclusive heart centres. Today, he says with pride, I am in a position to tell any patient coming for treatment to pay me whatever he can afford...and if he cant, we will do the operation free. Yet, Shetty despairs at the lack of health facilities in India. He says India needs to do 2 million heart surgeries a year but all the heart hospitals put together have a capacity to do only 150,000 operations. The conditions for other type of surgeries are even more dire. Going forward, he says that more than funds to set up facilities, what remains key is training an adequate number of people for healthcare. There is a huge shortage of doctors, specialists, nursing and para-medical staff. Among the measures he advocates is that rather than spending time and money on building large medical colleges, existing hospitals should offer apprenticeship courses where on-the-job training is given and backstopped by online education courses. He believes India has great potential to be the healthcare provider to the world if it goes about doing its job seriously.

So what are his tips for staying healthy? For him, the most important is to be spiritual, to believe that there is a divine force protecting us. The second is to love your body and take care of it by not indulging in excesses. And the third is to be happy and surround yourself with loved ones. Good advice from a doctor who has saved thousands from disease and death.

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When I did a 100 heart operations in 1989, I knew it was possible to start a revolution in cardiac surgery: Dr Devi Shetty - India Today