News

Volume 2 Issue 15 - August 01, 2004

Club-foot clinic unable to cope with increasing demand

Situated in New Delhi, the Kalavati Saran Hospital is the only hospital in North India which houses a clinic catering to club foot treatment. The CTE syndrome, more commonly known as club-foot, is a congenital disorder that affects one in every 1,000 children. Urgency for treatment lies in the fact that the child born with a twisted foot can be treated non-surgically only if treatment is administered before he turns one.

As the child grows older, treatment becomes more complicated and surgical methods like Joshi’s External Stabilisation System (JESS) are used.

As there is no other medical aid in North India catering to this deformity, the hospital gets bombarded with floods of new patients every week. According to doctors at the clinic, Delhi alone has about 10,000 existing cases of club-foot with the number going up by 2,000 every year. On an average the clinic gets about 60-80 patients ever week, half of which are new patients. With the number of doctors posted at the two-hour clinic never exceeding 10, patients can sometimes be given appointments after two weeks, even at the cost of compromising on their treatment.