Sports Med: SSKM Hosp gets equipment worth Rs 19 crore

kolkata: High-end equipment worth more than Rs 19 crore have been installed at the newly set up sports medicine unit of the SSKM Hospital. This emerges to be the first such complete sports medicine unit in a teaching medical college in eastern India run by the state government.

The unit will have specific USG machines with musculoskeletal probe, complete cardiopulmonary stress testing in metabolic cart, speed, jump and turn analyser , and extremity MRI machines.

The unit is run by a multidisciplinary team of faculty members, including those from physical medicine and rehabilitation, Orthopaedic and Physiology. The unit is equipped to treat various types of injuries the players often suffer from in the course of the game or during practices. It will be expanded gradually and more such equipment will be installed in the process, confirmed sources.

Recently, a state-of-the-art sports medicine unit was inaugurated by Mamata Banerjee at the Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education & Research (IPGMER). Besides this, she also inaugurated a host of new projects at the IPGMER-SSKM Hospital including a seminar-cum-classroom for the radiotherapy department, 10 ICU beds for the Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery (IOHNS) department, a hyper acute stroke unit, a new 10-storeyed OPD building (4th-8th floor) and a 100-bed paediatric medicine ward.

Only a handful of medical institutes across the country are equipped with facilities such as rehab centres to deal with sports injuries. According to experts, sports medicine is a branch that deals with players’ injuries, physical exercise, fitness, and prevention.