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By Akpan David, Calabar
The University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH) has accomplished the feat of conducting open heart surgery, making her to be amongst the A-list of tertiary institutions.
The institution is therefore the first in he South-South region of Nigeria to accomplish the feat.
Chief medical director of the institution, Prof Ikpeme A. Ikpeme disclosed to journalists that the historical feat took over six hours and was done successfully.
He said that the patient whose name was not disclosed, was then safely wheeled out to their Intensive Care Unit.
“She had received a Mitral valve replacement”, he said.
He stated that it was a culmination of two years of hardwork, determination, sacrifice, vision and focus at different levels of our hospital to achieve the feat, which they can not be silent about.
He said they had signed an MOU for Open Heart Surgery Missions with the VOOM Foundation sometime in 2015/16 and later was reviewed in July/August 2019.
Towards ensuring their capacity to conduct the surgery, Ikpeme said they had to construct a new Theatre Suite using in-house Engineering and Technical teams and create a multidisciplinary Heart Surgery Team using state-of-the-art Heart-Lung machine, Heater-Cooler interexchangersystem, Cell savers, High end Anaesthetic Machine, and others
“As far as I know, we are the first Tertiary Health Institution in South-South Nigeria to accomplish this historical feat. We have therefore joined a group of very few elite centres nationwide which similarly achieved such feat.”
Ikpeme said they are offering such surgeries at 30% of their actual cost.
