Department of Digestive Diseases
Tata Medical Center
Department of Digestive Diseases
The Department of Digestive Diseases at the Tata Memorial Center, Kolkata provides the entire range of services needed in the management of patients with gastrointestinal, pancreatic-biliary, and liver cancers. The staff of the department provides a wide spectrum of clinical services and work within the gastro-intestinal/Hepato-biliary multidisciplinary team of TMC to provide the most appropriate evidence based treatment for an individual patient. Our staff also provide services related to general gastroenterology, hepatology, and clinical nutrition as and when needed to all the patients of Tata Medical Center.
The faculty of the department are very well trained, highly experienced and work full time at the TMC. They work closely with the pathology, radiology, nuclear medicine, surgery, radiation oncology, clinical pharmacology, medical oncology, palliative care and clinical nutrition service to ensure that our patients get the best treatment supported by evidence. The doctors and supporting staff have substantial expertise in diagnosing, staging and managing patients with gastrointestinal and hepato-biliary cancers covering the whole spectrum from prevention and early detection to palliation of advanced cancers. The department has state of the art endoscopic equipment’s and perform advanced gastrointestinal endoscopic procedures including EUS guided tissue sampling,
endoscopic surgery of flat and large polyps and early cancers (EMR/ESD), spy glass cholangioscopy and placement of expandable metal stents across the gastrointestinal tract. Our EMR integrated electronic endoscopy image system helps in better documentation for multidisciplinary consultations and periodic review.
The departmental staff in collaboration with clinical pharmacology and medical oncology provide all generic cytotoxic chemotherapies, targeted therapies and immunotherapy. We are able to offer precision oncology treatment to a large number of our patients with help of our molecular pathology services and we participate in global clinical trials. The department sees large case load of patients with rare gastrointestinal cancers such as GIST, neuroendocrine cancers and lymphoid malignancies in addition to very large number of patients’ common cancers of the gastrointestinal and hepato-biliary cancers.
The department is creating a dedicated unit for the prevention and early detection of gastrointestinal tract cancer. This unit would help patients with family history of gastrointestinal cancers and those with various precancerous conditions of the gastrointestinal tract to undergo periodic counselling and appropriate screening to reduce their risk of developing GI cancers. The department staff are active with continuing medical education, teaching and training and in conduction clinical research.
