Cardiac surgery without making the patient unconscious and repair of a damaged hip joint without replacement surgery will soon be a reality in Calcutta.

Wockhardt Hospitals is planning to offer these and other facilities in its 350-bed multi-speciality hospital coming up off the EM Bypass. The 350,000-sq-ft hospital is expected to be ready within a year.

“Apart from super-speciality treatments, we want to introduce some new methods at the hospital,” said Habil F. Khorakiwala, the chairman and managing director of Wockhardt.

High thoracic epidural analgesia or awake heart surgery will be one of the new surgeries that will be introduced in the Wockhardt hospital, added Khorakiwala.

“In the surgery, micro doses of local anaesthetic are injected in the epidural space around the spinal cord to anaesthetise only the chest region. The rest of the system is fully awake,” explained Vivek Jawali, the chief cardiovascular surgeon at Wockhardt Hospital and Heart Institute, Bangalore.

“The patients are not required to be put on artificial respiratory support during the surgery,” he added.

According to doctors, nearly 70 per cent of cardiac patients suffer from diabetes. About 15 per cent of them are in various stages of renal failure. “For these patients, total anaesthesia can be harmful. The surgery is also good for those suffering from asthma and lung diseases,” said Jawali.

Kunal Sarkar, a cardiologist at Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences, said: “It is a novel concept but the clinical benefits of the method are yet to be known.”

Hip-joint resurfacing will be another special facility at the new hospital. In conventional hip replacement, a large amount of normal bone is sacrificed and there could be progressive bone loss. “The replacement also increases risk of dislocation,” said Kaushal Malhan, a consultant joint replacement and resurfacing surgeon at Wockhardt Hospitals, Mumbai.

In the resurfacing method, only the diseased bone surface is replaced with a metal cap implant. “It is very effective for young patients, since the major part of the bone is preserved,” explained Chandrasekhar Dhar, a city-based joint replacement surgeon.