Innovations Editor
FREE open-heart surgeries have resumed at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals in Harare, with nine patients having benefited so far from the services in the first quarter of this year.
Veteran cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon Dr Wilfred Muteweye told The Herald recently that his team had recorded steady progress and was optimistic of realising this year's target of 60 patients.
"For 2024 we started at the end of January. Just this year we have done nine patients. Despite some challenges of getting some consumables, I am quite optimistic that we may soon be doing two cases a week once we get reliable and consistent supplies," he said.
"We are building up gradually. We have been doing one open heart surgery case per week for the past few weeks".
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.
As at December 2023, the team managed to conduct 22 open heart surgeries. Out of this figure, three patients died and 19 recovered well.
"We currently have three patients at Parirenyatwa Hospital who are recovering from the surgeries. One of them had two valves which we replaced. She is almost ready for discharge," Dr Muteweye said.
"We continue to get support from the Government. None of our patients are paying for the surgeries.
"We are planning to start doing open heart surgery for children this year, probably in July-August. Our target for this year is to do a minimum of 60 open heart surgeries."
Zimbabwe resumed open heart surgery at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals last June after the services were stopped in 2018.
From 2018 to 2023, patients had to fork out huge sums of money to seek treatment in South Africa, India, Kenya, Italy, Sudan and other countries offering open heart surgery.
Health experts say a heart operation in India costs anything between US$8 000 to US$15 000 depending on the complexity of the case.
In Zimbabwe, open heart operations are done free of charge.
The country has between 500 and 600 adult patients with rheumatic heart disease awaiting surgery while about 4 000 children are born every year with congenital heart deformities that need open heart surgery.
"We have the capacity to conduct these operations and even more complex heart surgery. We are gradually building up our capacity and our team is becoming more efficient," Dr Muteweye said.
"The operation times are now shorter, that is the time when the patient is on the operating table, and the average stay in the intensive care unit has also become shorter."
Zimbabwe has a history of heart operations that dates back to 1959.
The first case of open-heart surgery in Zimbabwe was reported in 1959 when two surgeons then (Dr NJ Micklem and Dr GVS Wright) used external body cooling methods to conduct a successful operation on a 15-year-old boy who had a diseased pulmonary valve.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a philanthropic team from Loma Linda University, California, the US, visited Zimbabwe to perform open heart surgeries.
From 1988 to 1992, a local team of specialists was set up to do operations, while the open heart surgery programme became a permanent feature from 1994, run by Dr David Chimuka and Dr William Mahalu and a few others.
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The programme ceased to function due to lack of foreign currency to purchase the consumables in 2003 when more than 400 patients had benefited.
Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally with more than 19 million deaths per year reported, according to a report by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Globally, heart disease-related deaths increased from 12,4 million in 1990 to 19,8 million in 2022.
Health experts say the regions of Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East are estimated to have the highest burden of deaths due to heart related diseases, with high blood pressure, raised cholesterol, dietary risks and air pollution being the leading causes.
