FOR THE PEOPLE
Dr Mahesh Joshi, 46, CEO, Apollo Home Healthcare Ltd.
The family of 78-year-old Gayatri Devi has immense gratitude for the staff at Apollo Home Healthcare since they went way beyond their job description to fulfill a terminally ill patient’s last wish. “She was in the hospital for more than three months, and ardently wished to attend her grandson’s wedding. We facilitated this by setting up an ICU right at the baraat door,” shares Mahesh Joshi. Many such heartening stories have now become commonplace at Apollo Home Healthcare, which was started in 2014 with three people, and two years later, has grown into a 700-member team that has impacted close to 8,000 patients. “The elderly population forms about 70-80 per cent of this chunk,” says Joshi, explaining the importance of home care. “Hospital is never a destination of choice but compulsion. At one’s home instead, there’s a sense of comfort, which aids recovery. Earlier, just to give an IV injection, a patient had to be hospitalised. But that can easily be handled at home now. The sense of security of being in a hospital is being transferred to the home of the patient,” he says. Home health care is a crucial service for gifting a new lease of life for some and to “enable a more dignified life for the terminally ill and the elderly,” says Joshi. As in the case of 83-year-old Babu Rao, who has been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. After a month of hospitalisation, his family was asked to take him home since nothing more could be done to improve his condition despite being put on a ventilator. After two weeks of home care, he showed remarkable improvement and with an oxygen concentrator as a constant companion now, he has managed to live fairly healthy till a year and a half after doctors had given up all hope. Website apollohomecare.com