Mamta Mohandas with Alisha Moopen and other officials at the inauguration of the cancer centre.

Mariecar Jara-Puyod, Senior Reporter

With the aim of assisting expatriate cancer patients get the most of quality care, a leading healthcare provider in the UAE on Monday inaugurated an eight-private room comprehensive cancer care unit in one of its hospitals in Dubai with the goal of carrying out the concept in other parts of the country as management sees fit.

Chief guest was Malayalam film actress Mamta Mohandas, diagnosed with lymphoma cancer in 2009 and free from it since 2012. Grateful that in her “journey,” God continually provides her with “angels that guide her,” the number one of whom is her mother and the several doctors introduced and referred to her in India and the USA, she expressed full support to the Aster DM Healthcare initiative. She stressed that patients ultimately need quality care demonstrated by the dedication and the humanness of everyone in the scientific and medical communities for each and every patient, given the assurance that they are cared for: “This has made me feel happy. I am happy for the patients who would be coming here. Cancer shakes the entire ecosystem with the person emotionally, physiologically, economically, psychologically. (It is good that here), patients will not be looked at differently and not as a disease.”

From the press conference, Aster DM Healthcare deputy managing director Alisha Moopen expressed confidence that with a team of highly-trained multi-disciplinary team of specialists from the UAE and elsewhere in the world coordinating closely with one another with their family-approach orientation for each patient, cancer patients in the UAE would have more of the “enabling ecosystem” that would help them defeat the dreadful disease. First and foremost with the encouragement for “early detection and early prognosis with the right atmosphere by bringing in the best doctors on board (alongside) surgical intervention and chemotherapy” (for now).”

The Comprehensive Cancer Care Centre, otherwise known as the Department of Oncology on the sixth floor of the Aster Hospital in Al Qusais, Dubai is unique, Gulf Today learnt. Interviewed, Surgical Oncology consultant Dr. Sivaprakash Rathanaswamy explained that while a “Tumour Board” is generic in all tertiary healthcare facilities worldwide, particularly those which have oncology as one of its core of sub-specialities, this comprehensive cancer care centre has for its Tumour Board members the network of cancer specialists and experts in India, for now.