Ruby General Hospital, Kolkata

If a parent in their seventies has been advised a hip replacement, most of the work that determines how well it goes happens outside the operating theatre and falls to the family. Getting the house ready, getting their other medical conditions stable, and knowing what the first fortnight actually looks like matters more than which brand of implant goes in. Any reliable hospital in eastern India will tell you the same thing, usually after the decision has already been made. Indian families tend to be present for all of this in a way that hospital systems elsewhere don't assume. That's a genuine advantage, but only if the family knows what to do with it. This is the practical version, organised by when you need to act. What should the family sort out before surgery? The weeks before admission are the most underused part of the whole process. Four things matter: Get the other conditions properly controlled: blood sugar, blood pressure, thyroid, heart and kidney function. Anaesth...

The decision between angioplasty and bypass surgery isn't made by the patient, and it usually isn't made by one doctor either. It's made by looking at your angiogram and asking a specific set of questions about how many vessels are blocked, where the blockages sit, how complicated they are, and what else is going on in your body. Any good heart hospital in Kolkata will treat that as a joint call between cardiology and cardiac surgery, not a preference. Most families find this out at the worst possible moment. The angiogram is done, someone comes out and says the word "bypass", and there's a scramble to work out whether that's the right advice or whether a stent would have done the job. So here's what that decision actually rests on, who makes it, and the questions worth asking before you agree to either option. Who makes the decision, the cardiologist or the surgeon? Ideally, both. The cardiologist performs the angiogram and sees the anatomy first. If...