The Pediatric Center at Tambaram Hospital is an ongoing effort to support and improve the pediatric care delivered at Tambaram Hospital near Chennai, India (also know as Government Hospital of Thoracic Medicine, Tambaram Sanatorium). We are a small group of individual donors and volunteers, and we welcome you to join us in this effort. Tambaram Hospital is a large public teaching hospital near the southern Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras). Originally founded as a tuberculosis sanatorium in the 1920s, Tambaram began treating HIV patients in the early 1990s, and since then has seen an exponential rise in the number of HIV admissions. They are currently diagnosing approximately 1000 new HIV cases each month. As a public hospital, Tambaram accepts all patients at no charge, despite extremely limited resources. Patients come from all of Tamil Nadu state, as well as neighboring states. Tambaram is treating the largest volume of HIV cases of any public hospital in India. At Tambaram, inpatient pediatric facilities are centered in a 40-bed open ward. The majority of the children come from poor rural families, and a significant proportion are AIDS orphans. Parents, grandparents, or guardians stay with children in the ward, sleeping on mats on the floor next to the childrens' beds. The Pediatric Center is a long-term effort to support social work, improve infrastructure, and improve clinical care in the pediatric ward at Tambaram. You can see a segment filmed at Tambaram in the feature documentary A Closer Walk, on the global AIDS pandemic.     Website design services were donated by skyhand website design, seattle