Bangladeshi doctor Bim Bhowmick has pioneered a geriatric care system in Wales he would like to test in Malta. During a recent visit to the island, he said he had to beg for money as a child to be able to go to school.

On a humid and mosquito-infested night in 1946, his mother, Ashalata, pulled him from under the insect curtain and, putting her forefinger to her mouth, ordered him to stay quiet.

One by one, she woke up his four brothers and ushered them out through the backdoor and into the rice fields that surrounded their house in a rural village in East Bengal, today known as Bangladesh. Knee-deep in water, they waded away from the house and hid for more than an hour, as leeches clung to their legs.

Six-year-old Bim did not know what was happening. But later, as he lay in bed, he could hear his parents talking. A group of thugs had gone to the Hindu family's house and demanded money, threatening to kill everyone unless they got what they wanted.

"Father gave them all his savings but we had nowhere to hide and he knew they would be back for more," Prof. Bhowmick, now 70, recalled.

It was a time of upheaval in his homeland, when the British, who ruled India at the time, decided to divide the large span of land along ethnic lines, creating Pakistan, part of which later became Bangladesh.

In their small village, with no access to newspapers or radio, his family lived a quiet life. But all that changed on October 10, 1946 when the Bhowmicks' house was raided. The next day the thugs returned.

"At 10 p.m. we heard them shout 'Allah u Akbar' and we ran away with mother," Prof. Bhowmick said. "It had become a ritual." That night, the thugs took Ms Bhowmick's jewellery, on the third day they stole rice from the warehouse and on the fourth day they took the family's clothes.

"They were tightening the noose around us," Prof. Bhowmick said pensively.

The family had nowhere to go. The railway station was some 80 miles away and the only way to get there was either by bullock cart or on a boat along the river. But both means of transport were in the hands of Muslims, rendering them inaccessible to the Hindu family.

"We were sitting ducks."

On the fifth day, his father, Jamini, was sure the family would be burnt alive. "The despair was etched on his face."

That morning, Mr Bhowmick traded a gramophone for the use of a boat, which was pulled along the canal for eight hours. Once at the train station, they could not travel in a passenger train because Hindus were being slaughtered on the border with India. Instead, they waited for a freight train.

"The door opened and it was dark and dirty inside. They closed the door behind us and we were in pitch darkness. But nothing bothered us because we were happy to be alive," Prof. Bhowmick said.

Eight hours later, they arrived in India where they started their life as refugees, living in dire poverty. "A neighbour used to give us a kilo of rice every other day and my mother would make us a bowl of soup."

But the poverty was too much for his father, whose pride made him refuse charity food. He got weaker and weaker and developed an abscess that failed to heal. "We did not have any money to get him a doctor and I saw him wilt away in front of me," he said. His eyes welled up as he remembered how he used to wipe the ruptured abscess with his mother's sari.

"My father died six weeks later and before he passed away he held my hand and told me I would be a good doctor one day."

With education in India being against payment, Prof. Bhowmick's road to a medical profession was fraught. He walked barefoot for 2.5 miles to go to school, borrowing his friends' books and memorising them because he had no money to buy his own. Although he came top of his class in the half-yearly exam, he had to pay to sit for the annual.

"Mother told me to ask my friend's father for the money. I went and knelt in front of him, held his feet and asked for help."

He aced the exams, placing top of class, which meant the following year's tuition was free, and annual good results allowed him to continue studying despite his poverty. He graduated as a doctor before leaving for Wales in 1969. In Wales he has been honoured as one of the best doctors, even receiving an OBE from the Queen for services to the elderly in 2000.

Then, in 2007, Prof. Bhowmick started a project that revolutionised care for the elderly in Torafen, a borough in south Wales. With the help of a group of nurses, he set up a virtual ward in the community.

"If you allow old people to get into a hospital, some of them will get stuck there," he said, adding that several studies around the world showed that up to 20 per cent of admissions were unnecessary.

However, offering quality service within the community kept the elderly in their homes, freeing up hospital beds.

Within a year, the team saw 1,400 patients in their homes and Prof. Bhowmick estimates that this prevented some 1,100 unnecessary hospital admissions, saving about £2 million. The number of blocked beds went down from 68 to 13 in two years.

Prof. Bhowmick believes that the system, now being adapted in other parts of Wales, could help alleviate the burden on Malta's own Mater Dei Hospital, where beds are blocked by patients who do not need acute treatment but have nowhere else to go.

"It saves money and patients recover faster because they are at home," he said.