The promoters of the Divine Nursing Home, an 80-bedded hospital in Kolkata had decided to start another unit of its hospital in the Jaipur city. The proposed place for the health facility is at Bapunagar, Jaipur and it aimed at fulfilling the health needs of people primarily residing in and around Bapunagar, Gopalpura, C-Scheme, Jawahar Nagar etc.

IIHMR was entrusted for doing feasibility study and preparing the Project Report, which enumerated the following:

• Environmental Scan
• Project Design ' Facilities Plan
• Techno-commercial Feasibility including Financial Projections for five years

Environmental scan was done using both primary and secondary data. General physicians, senior consultants, hospital administrators, diagnostics facilities, healthcare experts were interviewed to understand the supply side needs and issues. Household Survey was also done using conveniences sampling to understand the customer perception about present healthcare facilities in town, need of new hospital and expectations from the new facility.

The health care provision in Jaipur is dominated by the private sector comprising Charitable Trust Hospitals and Nursing Homes. According to the Rajasthan Patrika (2005) Jaipur has nearly 24 government hospitals and 91 private hospitals. A rapid survey about bed utilization observed that most of the hospitals are working at more than 70% occupation rate, which clearly is an indication of scarcity of new beds in the city.

Most of the consultants were just satisfied with the present status of patient care and patient care facilities in hospitals in Jaipur city. The experts opined that these hospitals lack comprehensive care units for cardiology, cosmetic surgery, replacement surgery, open transplant, trauma care, and neurology.

It was found that among those households, who visited the hospitals in last one year, nearly 19% visited SMS first, 18% had opted for general practitioners and approximately 14% opted for SDMH. Among other preferred hospitals were Soni, Janana, Tongia etc. Among those who visited the hospitals, only 30% were satisfied by the services of respective hospitals and 13% were unsatisfied. A huge proportion, 57% of respondents said they were not aware of the satisfaction level.

In response to the expectations from a new hospital most of the households opined that the hospital should offer quality treatment, correct and timely diagnose, good infrastructure, affordable price, availability of qualified, punctual & experienced doctors, cleanliness, patient friendly attitude of doctor, punctuality and care from other staff, ethical practices, availability of all diagnostic services under one roof, and last but not the least near by facility in the given order.

Following are the snapshots of hospitals in Jaipur:

• Jaipur lacks the state of the art super specialty hospitals, as most super specialty services are part of general hospitals as thrust areas
• Even though the cases of Neurology and Diabetes have increased tremendously, most hospitals of Jaipur do not include these in their major thrust areas.
• Jaipur hospitals need comprehensive care units for cardiology, cosmetic surgery, replacement surgery, open transplant, trauma care, neurology and diabetic care centre.
• Affordable quality care using good infrastructure, qualified and experienced doctors are the most important expectation from the new hospitals. Promptness, patient friendliness and ethical practices are other important aspects a new hospital should look for.