RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Car­diac surg­eries are cost­ly, rang­ing from $170,000 to $250,000, which many peo­ple can­not af­ford, es­pe­cial­ly if they do not have med­ical in­sur­ance.

How­ev­er, a team of doc­tors from the Caribbean Heart Care Med­corp Ltd (CHCm) have been do­ing these surg­eries at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex at no cost to the pa­tient.

The Min­istry of Health foots the bill and both blood­less surg­eries and surg­eries with blood trans­fu­sions have been suc­cess­ful­ly done in both North and South Trinidad since 1993.

In an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, CHCm’s man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Dr Ka­mal Ram­per­sad said any cit­i­zen re­quir­ing car­diac surgery, can ap­ply to the Min­istry of Health.

He said his team of spe­cial­ist sur­geons led by chief car­diac sur­geon Pro­fes­sor Gio­van­ni Teodori will per­form the surgery at no cost at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex.

“Surgery is free. I want to ad­vise cit­i­zens that they can join the car­diac clin­ic, lead­ing to the Min­istry ap­prov­ing the surgery and so we will op­er­ate with­out any charge,” Dr Ram­per­sad said.

For those with med­ical in­sur­ance, Dr Ram­per­sad said the in­sur­ance is ap­plied and an ap­pli­ca­tion is then made to the Min­istry of Health to pay the re­main­ing bal­ance.

“Any­body is el­i­gi­ble to be op­er­at­ed on at EWM­SC as long as they are a cit­i­zen,” he added.

Asked whether there were chal­lenges in this process and what could be im­proved, Dr Ram­per­sad said the Min­istry could ex­pe­dite the rate of ap­proval for surg­eries, not­ing that the bu­reau­cra­cy in the Min­istry may be a de­ter­rent. For those who can af­ford pri­vate care at CHCm, Dr Ram­per­sad said car­diac surg­eries usu­al­ly cost $170,000.

Call­ing on cit­i­zens to re­main vig­i­lant with their health, Dr Ram­per­sad said it was im­por­tant to ex­er­cise, eat health­ily and mon­i­tor your health by do­ing reg­u­lar check­ups.

He said CHCm has achieved 100 per cent suc­cess in blood­less surg­eries done on Je­ho­vah’s Wit­ness pa­tients, who res­olute­ly refuse blood for re­li­gious rea­sons.

“A spe­cial method is used by Pro­fes­sor Teodori so blood trans­fu­sions are not nec­es­sary,” Dr Ram­per­sad re­vealed. This method in­volves en­hanc­ing the speed of haemo­glo­bin pro­duc­tion us­ing vi­t­a­min B12, fo­late and iron sup­ple­ments be­fore surgery.

“We al­so use the heart-lung ma­chine if the surgery is too dif­fi­cult or too tech­ni­cal. This heart-lung ma­chine as­sists in oxy­genat­ing the blood. That is ac­cept­able to Wit­ness­es in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. We some­times take a unit of blood and keep cir­cuits con­nect­ed and so we do an in­fu­sion (of the pa­tient’s own blood) not a trans­fu­sion,” he ex­plained.

In a case re­port pub­lished in a West In­di­an Med­ical Jour­nal by the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, this suc­cess in blood­less surg­eries among Wit­ness­es was out­lined.

“The ar­ti­cle shows where we did blood­less surgery with Je­ho­vah’s Wit­ness pa­tients and had we had 100 per cent suc­cess in all blood­less surg­eries,” he added.

Mean­while, Dr Teodori said he has been op­er­at­ing with CHCm in Trinidad for the past 14 years.

“I’ve done more than 5,000 surg­eries dur­ing this pe­ri­od and I have done more than 20,000 cas­es in to­tal,” he added.

Every year, CHCm per­forms 400 car­diac surg­eries and Dr Teodori said less than 30 per cent of pa­tients re­quire trans­fu­sions.

“Sev­en­ty per cent don’t re­ceive blood. Those who get blood trans­fu­sions are those who usu­al­ly have a low­er lev­el of haemo­glo­bin.”

He said the rate of re­cov­ery for Je­ho­vah’s Wit­ness pa­tients who do not get trans­fu­sions is the same as those who get blood trans­fu­sions.

But Dr Tedori said a low lev­el of haemo­glo­bin can make a pa­tient weak.

He al­so not­ed that all un­used blood goes to the na­tion­al blood bank.

“We do ask the pa­tient to pro­vide some blood and so the Blood Bank re­ceives an ex­tra amount of blood. We nev­er ask peo­ple to buy blood, the do­na­tion has to be vol­un­tary and if the pa­tient does not get blood, it doesn’t mat­ter be­cause we do the surgery in any case,” he added.

Dr Tedori said this is a ser­vice to the na­tion as there are nev­er enough blood donors.