What drives us is nothing but passion– Dr S. Manivannan, Joint Managing Director, Kauvery Hospital
Every entrepreneur will face a lot of challenges, and only perseverance keeps you alive, keeps your organisation alive, says Dr S. Manivannan, Joint Managing Director, Kauvery Hospital (www.kauveryhospital.com). Another important message for entrepreneurs is innovation, he adds. “Unless you innovate in the way you practise your profession, you cannot stay above all the other people,” reasons the doctor, who is a senior consultant Anaesthesiologist and Intensivist with over a decade of clinical experience in this field, and who was given‘President Appreciation Award by the Indian Society of Anaesthesiologists for the year 2010.’
When I met Dr Manivannan, on the side lines of Medicall 2013, at the conclusion of a session on the management of family-owned hospitals, he highlighted that an MBBS student is taught how to treat patients, not how to manage a hospital. “But ultimately most of us end up managing our own hospitals,” Dr Manivannan notes. He had started a hospital 14 years ago, with 30 beds, and now it has grown to 750 beds.
Looking back at the journey, Dr Manivannan says, “It was an interesting and challenging experience. We faced many difficulties in getting agood set of doctors, finance, the right kind of professionals, and also in putting systems in place.When we expanded, we faced a lot of difficulties in sustaining our quality.”
Every aspect we did it with passion, he reminisces. “What drives us is nothing but passion, because we all come from ordinary middle-class families without any medical background. We are the first-generation doctors in the family. We wanted to prove something to the society and also give something back to the society. That’s why we started our hospital in Trichy, our hometown, though we had opportunity to start in Chennai or travel abroad. We are very happy that at Trichy we are able to offer tertiary care therapies and treatments to our people, which were earlier done only in a bigger city like Chennai. Now, a person of Trichy doesn’t travel to Chennai or Coimbatore for taking any tertiary care. This is the greatest satisfaction which an entrepreneur can have, more than any money or fame which they get.More than that, it really gives a lot of happiness to our parents, seeing their children doing more than what they’ve imagined and doing better to the society than what they’ve done.”
