daniel chigunwe
Talent Gore
LOCAL doctors have demonstrated the country’s capacity to compete with the best in the world in offering open heart surgery after almost 40 patients underwent surgery at Parirenyatwa Hospital.
Zimbabwean cardiac specialists are targeting to perform 60 free open-heart surgeries this year as they scale up efforts to significantly reduce the backlog of people needing treatment.
The country resumed open-heart surgery at Parirenyatwa in June last year after the service was stopped in 2018.
Specialist cardiothoracic surgeon and head of the open heart surgery team at Parirenyatwa, Dr Simukayi Machawira, said the programme was moving well and benefiting a lot of people who could not ordinarily afford it in the past.
“The journey has been fairly fruitful and we are almost at patient number 40,” he said.
“We have obviously faced our challenges, which is mainly with procurement of consumables.
“However, I’m happy to say despite the challenges, we are very happy with the progress we have made. We are having a good outcome for our patients and our patients are very happy with our services.”
Dr Machawira said since they started, they have lost four patients.
“Two of them succumbed to infection, one succumbed to kidney failure and one, unfortunately, bled post-operatively and we were unable to get blood and blood products that we needed for that patient,” he said.
“The others have done very well, except one who died, close to a year after the surgery.”
But with all this success, Dr Machawira highlights the need for more education among the public on the availability of services in the country. This is because quite a number of Zimbabweans still seek specialist health care outside the country.
“There are some patients who have been offered surgery locally but we see them in the newspapers and social media trying to raise funds to have the surgery done out of the country,” he said.
Online Reporter