A Delhi Children's Hospital Is Quintupling Its Intensive Care Beds And Doubling In Size

Kalawati Saran to go from 394 to 894 beds, with intensive care capacity rising fivefold

Image Source: @JPNadda on X

A children's hospital in central Delhi is to more than double its bed capacity as part of an expansion reviewed on Monday by India's health minister, J P Nadda. Kalawati Saran Children's Hospital will go from 394 beds to 894, its intensive care capacity from 40 beds to 200, and its operating theatres from four to twelve. Construction is under way on the campus.

The hospital is attached to Lady Hardinge Medical College, one of Delhi's oldest public medical institutions, along with Sucheta Kriplani Hospital. Minister Nadda reviewed progress across all three, covering infrastructure, clinical services, medical education and research.

The government says the expansion is intended to strengthen specialist paediatric care and to widen capacity for training doctors at undergraduate, postgraduate and super-speciality level. Public hospitals in Indian cities routinely run well beyond their sanctioned capacity, with patients travelling from neighbouring states for treatment unavailable at home.

Nadda told the meeting that projects should be planned with a patient-centred and future-oriented approach, drawing on the practices of leading institutions in each field, and that construction quality and timelines should be monitored closely. He said infrastructure expansion and the recruitment of nurses, doctors and other staff must proceed together, a point that goes to a recurring weakness in Indian public health projects, where buildings are completed faster than they can be staffed.

He asked for a comprehensive master plan setting out a long-term institutional vision across coming decades, and said private-sector expertise and partnerships could be explored where appropriate, provided quality and patient care remained central.

The minister also visited two facilities. The first was a simulation training centre at Lady Hardinge, where medical students and doctors practise procedures on manikins and simulated patients rather than learning on live ones. It has dedicated areas replicating an intensive care unit, surgical and obstetric theatres, a neonatal unit, and trauma, ENT and ophthalmology settings, together with briefing and debriefing rooms. Such centres are used to build not only technical skill but decision-making, teamwork and communication under pressure, which are among the commonest factors in medical error.

The second was a newly operational neonatal intensive care unit at Kalawati Saran. The hospital's neonatology department has 80 intensive care beds and handles more than 10,000 deliveries and 2,500 NICU admissions a year, with overall survival above 93 per cent, according to the health ministry. The department offers high-frequency oscillatory ventilation, inhaled nitric oxide therapy and therapeutic hypothermia, a treatment in which a newborn deprived of oxygen at birth is cooled for several days to limit brain injury.

The new unit has seven intensive care beds, eight high-dependency beds, fifteen beds for kangaroo mother care and twelve cots for mothers. Kangaroo mother care, in which a premature or low-birthweight baby is held continuously against a parent's bare chest, is a low-cost practice that the World Health Organization recommends and that has been shown to reduce newborn deaths.

Officials present included the chief executive of the National Health Authority, Sunil Kumar Barnwal, the director general of health services, L G Krishna, and the director of Lady Hardinge Medical College, Himani Ahluwalia.