WHY WE EXIST
Most children who need heart surgery in India never get it.
240,000
babies are born with a congenital heart defect in India every year, roughly one in every hundred live births.
70,000
of them have critical disease, needing intervention inside the first year of life.
Receive Care
The share of children born with a heart defect in India who get the medical or surgical treatment they need.
Of the centers needed
Advanced centers able to deliver comprehensive pediatric cardiac care meet under a tenth of the requirement, and cluster in the south and the metros.
Die before turning one
Without timely intervention, this is the proportion of affected children who do not reach their first birthday.
600
paediatric cardiologists in the country
120
pediatric cardiac surgeons in the country
₹1.5–5 lakh
the cost of corrective surgery
10%
of all infant deaths in India
Congenital heart disease is the leading cause of death from birth defects in India. The barrier is rarely the operation. It is being found, reaching a centre, and being able to pay.
WHO WE ARE
Amrita’s Pediatric Cardiac Program began in 1998, when paediatric cardiac care in India was barely a specialty. Twenty-eight years later it is built around a single recognition: that a child born with a heart defect needs more than a skilled pair of hands. She needs a team that understands how a growing heart behaves, how much the first hours matter, what her parents can afford, why specialised care so rarely reaches the places she is likely to have been born in, and that she will still need them at thirty.
35,100+
congenital heart surgeries and interventions
1,000+
arterial switch operations in newborns
1,000
TAPVC repairs
2,500+
congenital heart surgeries and interventions
7,500+
arterial switch operations in newborns
₹91 Cr+
TAPVC repairs
We help write the science, not only apply it
The designation is given for original research rather than clinical volume, and it was earned on a specific premise: that congenital heart disease presents differently here than in the literature it is usually treated from. Children arrive late and underweight, often with pulmonary hypertension already established, to families for whom the cost of an operation exceeds a year’s income. Those are the problems this department set out to solve, and its findings are now applied across India and much of the developing world.
Where the answers do not yet exist anywhere, the department works at the frontier rather than behind it. That means standing collaborations with Boston Children’s Hospital, Evelina London, UCSF and Georgia Tech, and South Asia’s first Extended Reality Lab, built here, where a surgeon rehearses a complex repair inside a model of the child’s own heart before opening her chest.
India’s binding constraint is detection, not the number of operating theaters
The shortfall in paediatric cardiac care is usually described as too little surgical capacity. It is more accurately a failure of diagnosis: most affected children are never identified, and by the time they are, the clinical window has often closed.
So the department goes to find them. Screening camps are run deliberately in the regions where almost no child with a heart defect has ever reached an operating table, alongside formal agreements with the state governments responsible for them. A child found early is a child who can be treated simply, cheaply, and once.
CAMPS ACROSS INDIA
Jammu & Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Odisha, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.
AND BEYOND IT
Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Uganda and Ethiopia.
Capability compounds only when it is transferred
No single centre can close a national gap by operating. What this department has done instead is give the work away.
Six of India’s leading paediatric heart surgeons trained in this unit, as did the first three paediatric cardiologists for the whole of Sri Lanka, and programmes in Japan, China and Portugal have sent surgeons here. Every one of them treats children this department will never see. Children’s HeartLink, on that basis, named Amrita the first centre in the world to be designated a Centre of Excellence in congenital heart disease care.
A family’s means do not decide a child’s chances
Congenital heart disease does not select for income, but survival does. The overwhelming majority of children who need this care are born into families without the means to pay for it. A programme built only on paying patients would therefore treat a small and unrepresentative fraction of the problem, which is why free and subsidised treatment has been part of this department’s structure rather than an exception to it.
It is a commitment the department demonstrates rather than declares, most plainly when its head was awarded a national medical prize and directed the entire sum to the fund that pays for children whose families cannot.
OUTCOMES
We do not grade our own results.
Finding a child is the first constraint. What happens once she reaches an operating table is the second, and it is the one a partner is entitled to see evidence on.
<2%
Current surgical mortality across all congenital operations, against a case mix weighted towards newborns and towards children who arrive late, underweight, and with pulmonary hypertension already established.6
Every operation performed here is submitted to an international registry, audited out of Boston Children’s Hospital, and benchmarked against more than seventy centres in over twenty-five countries.7
The International Quality Improvement Collaborative for Congenital Heart Disease was established in 2008 to benchmark congenital heart surgery outside high-income countries. Data is submitted continuously and independently audited, which means a partner does not have to build a measurement framework. One exists, it is external, and it predates the partnership. IQIC Site