Poona hospital opens new discipline

The city-based Poona Hospital and Research Centre has set up a school of interventional pulmonology to train doctors to detect complex lung ailments like cancer and tuberculosis (TB).

The chief of the school and the head of the pulmonology department at the hospital, Dr Nitin Abhyankar, said that the school would impart skilled and expert care training.

It would provide training to carry out bronchoscopy on patients, a procedure used to look inside the lungs’ airways through a thin viewing instrument called a bronchoscope.

“Bronchoscopy provides 95% accuracy when used on patients suffering from TB and there is non-availability of sputum. The use of such technique needs hands-on experience. The school would impart training to four doctors who have done their doctor of medicine (MD) and diplomate of national board (DNB),” Abhyankar said.

“This is the first school in the state of its kind. We will be admitting only four students in a year where every student doctor will be given individual attention for three months. Students from rural areas too are encouraged to join this school as this is a highly specialised area of medicine where they can undergo the training and reach the local masses, where pulmonology does not exist,” he said.

Abhyankar, who has conducted 10,000 bronchoscopies, will be training the students who will have to complete at least 50 procedures in three months to acquire a certificate in the field of bronchoscopy. Drs BJ Amin and P Lawate would be joining the school as faculty.