DAY CARE INFUSIONS
Chemotherapy, IV iron, rituximab and supervised blood transfusion, done in a day care bed with nursing and a doctor on the premises. You come in the morning and you go home the same evening.
Vijay Nagar Colony, Hyderabad · open 24 hours · nursing cover through the night
Some treatments need a bed, a nurse and a doctor within reach for a few hours, and then nothing. They do not need a night in hospital. Day care is the bed for those few hours.
It exists because the alternative is bad in both directions. Being admitted overnight for a four-hour infusion costs you a day of your life and a room charge you did not need. Being sent to a room where somebody puts up a drip and leaves is the other failure, and it is the more dangerous one, because the whole reason these drugs are given under supervision is the small chance that something happens in the first twenty minutes.
What you get here. A bed in the day care area, a trained nurse who stays with you, observations taken through the infusion, a physician on the premises at every hour, our in-house pharmacy and laboratory in the same building if something needs to be checked or given quickly.
Chemotherapy cycles are given here on a day care basis under Dr. Nadeem Ahmed, medical oncology, for solid tumours. Breast and prostate cancer are the two we see most.
Two routes lead here and both are ordinary. Dr. Nadeem sees some patients at Caspian and writes the plan here. Others he sees at his own hospital and sends across for the cycles, because a day care bed twenty minutes from your house beats one across the city when you are making the trip every few weeks for months.
Either way the protocol is his and we follow it. We do not change a dose, drop a drug or move a cycle on our own account. If something about the plan needs deciding, it goes back to him.
What is here. A day care bed, a nurse who stays through the cycle rather than starting it and leaving, a doctor on the premises at every hour including through the night, a laboratory in the same building for the counts that have to be seen before a cycle is given, and a pharmacy in the same building.
What it costs. The day care charge plus the drugs on your regimen, quoted together before the date is fixed. Regimens differ far too much for one printed figure to be honest, so we quote yours rather than somebody else's.
Chemotherapy is one part of treating a cancer and this is the only part we do. The rest we refer, and we tell you where rather than leaving you to find it:
What we do not do.
We give ferric carboxymaltose on an outpatient basis. This is the modern intravenous iron, and the reason it matters is arithmetic.
Most adults who are properly iron deficient need somewhere near a gram of iron to fill the tank. With the older intravenous iron, iron sucrose, the most you can give at one sitting is 200 mg, so a gram means five separate visits spread over a fortnight. With ferric carboxymaltose the ceiling is 15 mg per kilogram up to 1,000 mg, and it goes in over a minimum of fifteen minutes.
| Getting to 1,000 mg of iron | Visits | Spread over |
|---|---|---|
| Iron sucrose 200 mg maximum per sitting | 5 | About two weeks |
| Ferric carboxymaltose up to 1,000 mg per sitting | 1 | One morning |
If your calculated deficit is larger than one dose can cover, the second dose comes at least seven days later. Two visits, not ten.
The infusion itself is uneventful for most people. Headache, a flushed feeling, mild nausea and swelling around the drip site are the common ones and each ran at roughly three per cent in the trials.
The one that gets discussed is phosphate. A transient dip in blood phosphate happens in a large share of patients (a fall below 2.5 mg/dL was seen in around 45%), but it produced actual reportable trouble in about 3%, was usually silent, and had largely corrected itself by twelve weeks. It matters if you are having repeated doses, and that is the situation in which we check it rather than assume.
IV iron is not for everyone with a low haemoglobin.
You will have a ferritin and a transferrin saturation, or recent ones you bring with you, before iron is given. We would rather send you away with a plan than give a drip that was never going to help.
₹100, and that is the administration charge only. The iron itself and the consumables are billed separately by Caspian Pharmacy. You are told the total before the appointment is fixed.
We run rituximab infusions on a day care basis for patients sent to us by nephrologists and rheumatologists: membranous nephropathy, lupus nephritis, vasculitis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions where a specialist has already decided this is the treatment.
The decision is theirs. We do not start rituximab on our own initiative and we do not change a protocol somebody else wrote. What we provide is the thing that is otherwise surprisingly hard to find: a bed, a nurse who does not leave, monitoring through a long first infusion, and a doctor in the building, at a price that does not assume you are being admitted.
₹3,000 per day, and that is the day care charge only. It covers the bed, the nursing, the observations, the medical supervision and the observation period afterwards.
The drug is billed separately. Rituximab is expensive and its price varies by brand; call reception with the brand and strength on your prescription and you will be quoted the drug cost before you commit to the date. Nothing gets started before you have been told the total.
Premedication first (usually paracetamol, an antihistamine and a steroid), then the infusion, started slowly and stepped up if you are tolerating it. First infusions take several hours by design. Reactions, when they happen, happen early and are managed by slowing or pausing, which is precisely why somebody stays with you. Later cycles are usually quicker.
What this part of the service is not.
We transfuse blood on an inpatient or day care basis, with nursing observation throughout and a doctor on the premises.
We are not a blood bank and we hold no stock of blood. Nobody who needs a unit tonight should come here expecting one to be in a fridge.
What we do is the laboratory work around the unit. Your blood group is done first, in our laboratory, Caspian Diagnostic Centre, in this building, and CDC bills you for that test separately. A requisition then goes to Surya Blood Bank, Himayatnagar, and they send the bag across. The cross-match is done here once the unit arrives, and we do not charge for it. Nothing is put up until that cross-match passes.
Tell us early. Arranging the unit is the part that takes time, not the drip.
The administration charge is ours. It covers the bed, the nurse who stays with you, the observations through the transfusion and the medical supervision. It is charged per unit administered and the rate depends on what is being given. It is the same rate whether you are in a day care bed or admitted as an inpatient, so being admitted does not make the transfusion itself cost more.
The blood bank charge is not ours, and we do not add to it. Surya bills its own charges at actuals, on Surya's own receipt, and you pay the bank what the bank has charged. We do not mark up the unit. Their tariff describes those charges as covering the processing, the screening for transfusion transmitted infections, and the grouping and crossmatch the bank does on the unit at its own end before it releases it. That is work done on the unit, not on you. It is not the blood group taken from your arm, which is a separate test done here and billed to you by Caspian Diagnostic Centre, so seeing grouping on the bank's receipt does not mean the group here has been paid for.
| What is administered, charged by Caspian | Caspian charge, per unit |
|---|---|
| Packed red cells or whole blood | ₹1,500 |
| Single donor platelets (SDP) | ₹2,000 |
| Random donor platelets (RDP) or fresh frozen plasma (FFP) | ₹750 |
That rate is per unit. Two units of packed red cells is that charge twice over, and the blood bank charges for two units as well.
These are the blood bank's charges, not ours. Because they are billed at actuals on Surya's own receipt, what follows is what those actuals looked like in August 2026 rather than a price we set or can hold. It is here so you can see the size of the bank's side before you commit to anything, not as a quotation from us. There are three different kinds of charge in it and they do not combine in the same way, so they are set out in three tables rather than one.
1. The unit itself. You have one of these. What it costs depends on the product and, for red cells, on your group.
| Unit, charged by Surya Blood Bank | Blood bank charge |
|---|---|
| Packed red cells (PRBC) | ₹1,600 |
| Whole blood | ₹1,800 |
| Packed red cells or whole blood, any negative group | ₹2,200 |
| Leucodepleted packed red cells, any group. The white cells are filtered out of the unit. | ₹3,500 |
| Fresh frozen plasma (FFP) | ₹1,200 |
| Random donor platelets (RDP), the platelets separated from ordinary donations. | ₹1,200 |
| Single donor platelets (SDP), platelets collected from one donor on a machine. | ₹12,500 |
| Cryoprecipitate, a fraction separated from plasma. | ₹1,000 |
2. Things done to the unit, charged on top of it. These two are not products and you cannot have them on their own. If your doctor asks for either, its charge is added to the charge for whichever unit you are having.
| Done to the unit, charged by Surya Blood Bank | Added on top of the unit |
|---|---|
| Washing the red cells. The plasma is washed off the cells. | plus ₹400 |
| Irradiation of the unit. | plus ₹1,000 |
How that adds up, for packed red cells. Irradiated washed packed red cells is not a line in the first table. It is the packed red cell unit at ₹1,600, plus ₹400 for the washing, plus ₹1,000 for the irradiation, which is ₹3,000 on the blood bank's receipt. Our administration charge for packed red cells, ₹1,500, is a separate charge and sits on top of that.
Do not carry that ₹1,500 across. It is the packed red cell and whole blood rate only. Platelets and plasma are administered at a different rate, in the table further up: a single donor platelet transfusion carries ₹2,000 and a plasma or random donor platelet transfusion carries ₹750. Check which row is yours rather than assuming this one.
3. A procedure rather than a product. Nothing is transfused, so there is no unit to pay for and nothing from the two tables above applies.
| Procedure, charged by Surya Blood Bank | Blood bank charge |
|---|---|
| Therapeutic phlebotomy. Blood is taken off rather than given. | ₹500 |
Surya Blood Bank replaces against donation, and this is the part almost nobody is told.
Two donors give blood: one unit of packed red cells or whole blood is free.
One donor gives blood: one unit of fresh frozen plasma or random donor platelets is free.
This is the route by which a transfusion can come down to our administration charge and nothing else: ₹1,500 for a packed red cell or whole blood unit replaced by two donors, ₹750 for a plasma or random donor platelet unit replaced by one donor. If there is anybody with you who can donate, say so before the unit is requisitioned rather than after, because the arrangement is made at that point.
If the cost of the unit is the thing standing in your way, say so. Surya has told us it will consider a reduction for a patient who cannot meet the charge, if we ask. We cannot promise you an outcome and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can do is ask. Tell reception, or tell the doctor seeing you, rather than deciding on your own that the answer is no.
You are told what it comes to before anything is arranged. Tell reception which product your doctor has asked for and how many units. You are then told our administration charge, which is fixed and is in the table above, together with what the blood bank is charging for that unit as it stands and what Caspian Diagnostic Centre charges for the blood group, before the unit is requisitioned. The bank's side is billed at actuals on the bank's own receipt, so that part is theirs rather than a figure we hold, and if it moves you are told rather than finding it on the bill.
A transfusion is a few hours of sitting still and a nurse checking your temperature, pulse and blood pressure at intervals. Almost all of it is uneventful. The intervals exist because the rare reaction announces itself in the first fifteen minutes, and somebody has to be looking.
If you are being transfused repeatedly for anaemia, it is worth asking whether the anaemia has actually been worked up. Transfusion treats a number. Iron deficiency, B12 deficiency and blood loss all have causes, and some of them are fixable in a way that stops you needing the next transfusion.
| What | Included | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| Rituximab, day care | Bed, nursing, observations, medical supervision, observation afterwards. Drug billed separately. | ₹3,000 / day |
| Chemotherapy, day care | Day care charge plus the drugs on your regimen, quoted together before the date is fixed. | Quoted first |
| IV iron | The administration charge only. The iron itself and the consumables are billed separately by Caspian Pharmacy. | ₹100 |
| Blood transfusion | Our administration charge only, per unit administered, at the same rate in day care or as an inpatient. The rate depends on the product: ₹1,500 for packed red cells or whole blood, ₹2,000 for SDP, ₹750 for RDP or FFP. The blood bank is separate and is billed at actuals on its own receipt, and the blood group is billed separately by Caspian Diagnostic Centre. Donor replacement makes a unit free. | ₹750 to ₹2,000 per unit, plus the blood bank at actuals and the blood group |
| Consultation | Assessment, deciding whether the infusion is the right answer, and the plan. | ₹400 |
You are told the whole number before anything is started. Not the day care charge, then the drug, then a consumables line you had not heard of. One figure, before you agree to the date. Call +91 89193 41154 with what is written on your prescription.
Bring your prescription, your recent reports, and a list of your medicines. Eat normally beforehand unless you have been told otherwise, and bring somebody with you if it is a long infusion. Plan for the whole day on a first rituximab cycle, a couple of hours for iron, and for a chemotherapy cycle however long your oncologist has told you it runs.
Reception is answered at any hour and there is nursing cover through the night. Ring before you come so the bed and the drug are both there when you arrive.