THE International Children’s Heart Foundation (ICHF), commonly known as the Baby Heart

Foundation, has completed its fourth and final exercise in Guyana for 2016, providing free heart surgeries for infants born with congenital heart defects. Babies benefiting from the surgeries were mostly from hinterland locations.

Paediatric Cardiologist Dr. Rodrigo Soto told the Government Information Agency (GINA) that the results of those surgeries were favourable, and encourage much more support from the foundation in 2017.

“We have completed 95 surgeries with very good results — with extremely low morbidity and with mortality of only two per cent. That compares very (favourably) with even the US or Europe, so we are very happy we have seen this programme grown exponentially, and we look forward to our work in 2017,” Dr. Soto explained.

Dr. Soto added that the ICHF will be signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Government, through the Ministry of Public Health, to perform surgeries on infants born with heart defects and abnormalities.

“We have — we are in the process now — to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Public Health, and certainly the minister and the ministry understand pretty well the relevance of developing this programme, not only for the children with congenital heart disease, but…. We are also building local capacity to manage a paediatric intensive care unit,” he disclosed.

Once the MoU is signed, volunteers from the foundation in the United States will continue making trips to Guyana four times annually until 2020.

Dr. Soto has said that what matters for 2017 is the quality of care, level of results, and education being meted out to the local team of health care professionals and workers.

The Baby Heart Foundation has thus far trained 40 nurses, two surgeons, seven paediatric registrars, six scrub nurses, four anesthetic cardiology residents, and other local personnel with the aim of having the local health system equipped with specialists in the area.

When the programme began two years ago, no public health doctor had been exposed to paediatric cardiac surgery. One local doctor who benefited from the training, Dr. Merissa Seepersaud, told GINA of the overall intention of the foundation. “The whole aim of Baby Heart care is to not just operate on children, but to make sure that they train the local team, so that at some point in the future we will be able to take over and have ourselves a self-sustained unit. And we have been working towards that for the last two years,” Dr. Seepersaud said.

Dr. Soto told of the most recent case that was operated on. “We did a small (child) 2.4-kilogramme patient that had a coarctation of aorta, which is a narrowing of the aorta that, if it’s not treated, the patient will die in a few weeks to a month. He was operated on five days ago successfully, and he probably will be able to go home in the next two days.”

Congenital heart disease occurs at a rate of 0.8 to one per cent per year in the birth of babies, which means that infants born in Guyana among these statistics will have Congenital Heart Disease, Dr. Soto said. “That would put Guyana in anything between 60 to 70 patients every year, new patients every year with congenital heart disease that require surgery.”

Once these statistics are taken into consideration, more lives can be saved with significant declines in infant mortality. The line of surgeries performed by the Baby Heart Foundation is a start to ensuring the babies born with heart complications and defects are identified and treated in a timely manner.

(GINA)