King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital in Parel that turns 94 today, is turning its seminal hall into a 40-bed Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) on the second floor of KEM’s heritage building.

It has been observed over time that its current 16-bed MIUC was not enough to suffice the soaring number of patients that resort to the hospital. Reportedly, the BMC-run 1500 bed hospital had 7,000 patients coming to the OPD every day, last month. The upcoming MICU will include two dialysis units for critical patients and six beds for neuro-interventional radiology. Rs 16 crore has been sanctioned for it by the civic body and it is expected to be functional by the monsoon. In total, the hospital has 324 ICU beds spread across various specialities such as medicine, surgery, neurology, among others and they are always full. The MICU, which is among the most needed, has only 16 beds and the emergency unit has 15, forcing doctors to treat patients in medical wards and even corridors.

After reports shaming the situation, Amey Ghule, the health committee chairman reviewed KEM Hospital’s workload and urged authorities to increase the ICU beds soon.

Dr Hemant Deshmukh, dean of the hospital followed up the matter with BMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi and additional municipal commissioner Suresh Kakani and appealed to hasten the work to increase ICU beds in all civic-run hospitals, especially KEM.

The work for transforming a part into MICU has already started and tendering process for other requirements like beds, life support types of machinery, dialysis units etc will complete by the next week.