First open heart surgery at Moi Referral
A team of doctors from Kenyatta Hospital and Coast General Hospital with a patient before they carried out the First Open Heart Surgery at the Coast General Hospital in Mombasa in 2015. PHOTO| FILE| NATION
Patients from western Kenya can now access affordable and quality open heart surgery at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) in Eldoret.
Last week, seven patients underwent the pioneer open heart surgery at the hospital, in an operation by specialists from MTRH and their counterparts from the Moi University School of Medicine and the Kenyatta National Referral Hospital.
Four of the patients got double valve replacement, and the other three got single valve replacement in an operation that lasted four hours per patient.
Open heart surgery involves cutting open the chest to perform surgery on the muscles, valves or arteries in the heart. Fatty materials form plaque on artery walls, causing them to narrow and harden. This makes it difficult for blood to flow through, and may cause a heart attack.
Open heart surgery is done to to repair or replace heart valves, implant medical devices like pacemakers which help the heart beat properly, repair damaged parts of the heart and to do a heart transplant.
AFFORDABLE
The CEO of the hospital Dr Wilson Aruasa said that open heart surgery at the hospital will cost patients less than Sh300,000 as opposed to paying Sh1.2 million.
“NHIF will cater for Sh500,000, while the patient will foot the balance,” he said.
The hospital invested Sh15 million in equipment and other supplies necessary to perform the surgeries, and received support from the Kenyatta National Referral Hospital and the Ministry of Health.
“We sourced for a heart-lung machine and its consumables from Medtronics in the United States. We want to make these surgeries regular as we also work on providing cardiac catheterisation and other specialty surgeries,” said Dr Aruasa, adding that patients from neighbouring countries of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan, who seek treatment at the hospital, would also benefit from the services.
Because open heart surgery requires admission to the intensive care unit for a while after the surgery, the hospital also acquired more intensive care unit beds, raising capacity from 10 to 20.
