100 open heart surgeries will be carried out at UNTH Enugu on HWN UPDATE

No fewer than 100 patients suffering from different heart diseases are set to undergo open heart surgeries before the end of the year at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu, the hospital authorities have announced.

The hospital's chief medical director, Dr. Christopher Amah, who made the disclosure while briefing newsmen at the hospital recently said at least 15 cases, would be handled before the end of this month.

Amah who conducted newsmen round the wards apparently to have firsthand knowledge of the ongoing round of open heart surgeries, which he said was the 8th session since the programme was revived in 2013 reaffirmed the hospital's preparedness to handle the cases effectively.

This is what we have been doing for some time now. Our hospital is a designated national centre of excellence in cardiothoracic surgery and a flagship programme for that designation is the open heart surgery. We have been doing this since 1974, when the first one was done here and continued in doing quite a lot of them until about 2003 when we had a serious hitch.

The programme came to a halt for so many reasons particularly due to the fact that we relocated from the old site to the permanent site here in ItukuOzara where we did not have purpose built facility for that programme,” he explained.

He added: “But as God would have it this administration, which I head as the CMD and chief servant of course, we came on board May 2011, and we took it upon ourselves as one of the priority projects to revive that open heart surgery programme and by the grace of God we are able to do this by March 2013. That is 10 years after the programme was shut down. So we restarted that programme and between that time and now, we have done about eight such cases including adult and children,”

Amah said the hospital has been partnering oversea organisations such as Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, UK, whose Chief Surgeon is a Nigerian, Dr Onyekwere Nzewi and another group, Voom Foundation based in the United States.

According to him, the oversea partners who operate on charity basis brought in a lot of equipment, medical consumables and skills which made it possible for the hospital to carry out the open heart surgery at a subsidised rate of N1miilion to N1.5 million for adults and N750, 000 to N1 million for children as against N2.5 million to N3 million.

He said that Nigeria needs to carry out 10,000 open heart surgeries yearly, if the nation is to tackle heart disease burden effectively.
One of the patients that we are operating on currently is a former minister in this country. That is to tell you that we have the facility that is able to give our people reasonable level of confidence that cardiac surgery is done here almost routinely and safely.

So this is what we have decided to do here and we want to promise the new administration of President Muhammadu Buhari as well as the Enugu State Government where we are domiciled that UNTH is here to partner with them, to join hands with government to tackle healthcare issues in this country and especially as it concerns open heart surgery to curb medical tourism,” he said.

Source: Thisdaylive, HWN.