Published Aug 07, 2025 | 2:31 PM ⚊ Updated Aug 07, 2025 | 2:31 PM
Child. (Representational image)
Apollo Children’s Hospitals has completed over 6,000 paediatric cardiac surgeries and 10,000 interventional cardiac procedures since 2009.
At a press conference in Chennai, Dr Neville Solomon, Senior Consultant Paediatric Cardiac Surgeon, said the Department of Cardiac Sciences at Apollo has handled a wide range of high-risk and complex heart procedures in newborns and infants, many of them performed within the first month of life.
Nearly half the surgeries were performed on babies under 28 days old, including one just four hours after birth and another weighing only 650 grams.
In addition, Apollo has done over 1,500 surgeries at its other centres and during missions abroad, including in Iraq and Nigeria. These included major heart procedures like arterial switch and aortic arch repairs.
Highlighting advances in treatment techniques, Dr. C.S. Muthukumar, Senior Consultant Interventional Cardiologist, noted that around 25–30% of the surgeries involved open-heart procedures.
Apollo Children’s Hospitals has also partnered with eight government medical colleges to train the next generation of cardiac surgeons, aiming to strengthen paediatric cardiac care capacity in Tamil Nadu and beyond.
In Chennai, Apollo partners with the Institute of Child Health (ICH) to perform emergency heart surgeries on critically ill infants.
One such case involved a 19-day-old girl referred from Madurai to ICH Egmore, who was later operated on at Apollo. According to the team, these kinds of partnerships have helped extend advanced care to children referred by the Tamil Nadu government and from other Indian states, as well as from countries abroad.
Commenting on the achievement, Ilankumaran Kaliamoorthy, Chief Executive Officer of Apollo Hospitals, Chennai, said, this marked a significant step in their larger mission, adding that the team’s ability to handle complex paediatric cases, both independently and in collaboration with other institutions, had enabled them to care for children from across India and overseas.
