Operation Open Heart a blessing

FAMILIES who have rallied to raise funds for medical bills overseas have felt the brunt of not having specialist medical help and equipment in the country.
It can be painful, emotionally stressful and finally draining but if it is to save the life of a loved one, all efforts is given.
Some families have gone to the extreme of obtaining bank loans as a fast solution to get that lifesaving operation done. The agony of repayment is a hassle they deal with it later.
This week, about 10 children with heart condition will go under the knife in that once-in-a-life-time operation to correct and repair them.
They go into the history book of the Operation Open Heart programme, performed by medical professionals from Open Heart International (OHI) in Australia with local counterparts from PNG.
OHI is a humanitarian aid programme initiated by Sydney Adventist Hospital in 1986. Staffs from hospitals around Australia volunteer their personal time to form teams to travel to developing countries and implement specific projects that improved the access to specialist healthcare services in those countries including PNG.
Since 1993, it has changed the lives of more than 1000 young people. Local doctors and nurses have also benefitted from the training by the volunteer medical teams.
We say these children are lucky and blessed. Whatever happens this week will be something especially their parents will not forget for their rest of their lives.
One only has to have a chat with the parents of the patients to know what this means to them.
Heart Specialist Dr Noah Tapaua explained the programme is very significant as it helps to save lives as well as building human resource capacity of the doctors.
In previous years Operation Open Heart Programme had focused mainly on service delivery where 60-70 international heart specialists with fewer locals performing heart operation to 45-50 children annually.
It’s good to hear Dr Tapaua say that so far 29 nurses, one anesthetists and one cardiothoracic have been trained.
And we support sentiments shared by Dr Tapaua that the biggest challenge now is to have a heart centre provided with equipment so local doctors and nurses can fully use the skills and save more than a thousand lives they are saving now.
The local team, Dr Tapauau says, had cut down the number of heart patients for operation so the doctors and nurses can focus on training when dealing with two to three cases a day.
Hopefully, one day the local team can do more open heart surgeries.
Team leader and OHI project coordinator for PNG and East Africa Dr Darren Wolfers says their long-term aim was to build local capacity for Papua New Guineans to undertake open heart operations within the country themselves and that vision is not far from being achieved.
The team is looking forward to achieving that vision by 2020 where locals can play the big role while a team of at least four or five visiting surgeons can come from overseas to assist them until PNG can take on the open heart operations themselves.
Bringing such services which should be affordable or subsidised to our shores should be encouraged and supported at all cost.
We believe that with the support from the business community and the Government that vision is feasible.