Five years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to its knees, cities everywhere were forced to confront the fragility of their public health systems. Hyderabad was no exception; it had just one government facility equipped to handle the crisis — Gandhi Hospital. Its wards overflowed with patients and the medical staff worked around the clock, battling exhaustion and fear in equal measure. Those desperate times sparked a long-overdue realisation: that the State needed more resilient, better-equipped public hospitals that could stand firm in the face of any future public health emergency. Out of that urgency was born the Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences (TIMS) — a new generation of government hospitals that could match private facilities in both scale and sophistication.

Today, that idea conceived during the global emergency is taking solid shape at Sanathnagar, an industrial and residential neighbourhood of Hyderabad. A 1,000-bed super-speciality TIMS hospital is entering the final stretch of construction with officials said to have marked December 9 as the possible inauguration date.

The ₹1,070-crore project had received administrative sanction on April 21, 2022, followed by a foundation stone ceremony five days later.

A senior official of the Health Department says it will house 37 departments and function as a centre of excellence for cardiothoracic, cardiac and transplant sciences. Modeled on the lines of Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences, TIMS will operate under an autonomous system where medical and non-medical services would be managed separately. Of the total capacity, around 200 beds will be designated for paying patients.

Spread across 22.6 acres within the existing Government Chest Hospital campus and a total built-up area of 11.68 lakh square feet, the project is being executed by Megha Engineering and Inf