Foundation Trains UPTH Doctors, Others on Pacemaker Implantation
Felix Felix, Port Harcourt
Persons suffering from chronic heart diseases in Rivers State and Nigeria in general can now get care within the country.
This is as a team of doctors from the United Kingdom have held a one-week training for cardiologists and physiotherapists on modern techniques in treating heart ailments at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH).
The team of doctors from the Cardiovascular Foundation in the United Kingdom, led by Dr Neil Grubb, a Cardiac Electro-Physiologist and Jagdeep Singh, a Cardiologist and Cardiac Device Implanter, trained Nigerian doctors drawn from across the country on pacemaker implantation, Cardiac Resynchronization therapy,y, amongst other techniques.
The doctors on a medical mission to Nigeria also gave free treatments to 20 patients at the hospital.
While addressing journalists, Dr Neil Grubb explained their mission in Nigeria, saying they are basically in the country to teach doctors and nurses cardiac techniques.
Grubb noted that the background to the mission is the fact that many patients in the country are dying from treatable ailments because of a lack of access to care and the poor healthcare system in Nigeria.
“The main aim of our mission is not to threaten patients, although we love to treat patients, and the patients we treated this week undoubtedly benefitted from the treatment they received, but the main thing is that we want to leave a lasting legacy in Nigeria which means that we are spending as much time teaching as we are spending in actually doing the procedure itself.
“We are trying to train a generation of physiologists and cardiologists through these machines to Nigeria, and we are hoping that with these machines in Port Harcourt, teams will be coming three to four times a year by rotation because we need to train staffers” Grubb stated.
“The background to this is that here in Nigeria, you do not currently have a well-developed healthcare system as you should. There are pockets of expertise in Nigeria, where medicine is practised extremely well, but there are also areas where patients are denied treatment just because of a lack of resources. Many patients are completely unable to afford any form of medical treatment, and you know that some people are dying of conditions that can easily be treated,” he added.
Dr Grubb also explained that a pacemaker is a device implanted in the heart of persons with abnormally slow heartbeats, adding that the devices can be checked occasionally to ensure they function optimally. The patients are doing well after implantation, and a team of doctors has been trained at the UPTH to keep checks on the patients.
“So pacing is a technique we use to plant an electronic device under the patient’s skin, attached to wires connected to the heart. They must be guided using X-ray cameras; special training is required to implant these devices. They are also quite costly, but they are also a lot of waste in Western healthcare, so we are using some devices that cannot currently be used in hospitals in the United Kingdom. Instead of wasting and throwing them away, we brought them across here where they can be used for the benefit of people here,” he explained.
On his part, the Chairman of Medicalthe Advisory Council, CMAC UPTH, Professor Datonye Alasia, said with the training of doctors and physiologists at the hospital, persons who travel out to other countries to seek care can now access such care at the facility and others in the country.
“One of the things we want to achieve is to bring access to super specialised services to the people, and you know that most patients in Nigeria will pay out of pocket, and most of these services are not services that a particular socio-economic bracket could afford.
“So the takehome message is to be aware that there is hope and there is access for care for patients who have advanced cardiac diseases and that those services are available in University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital and even within our local environments and that we have competent staffs, networks and collaboration to provide access to those services and some may also be lucky to benefit from these missions assuming they were not able to afford them,” Alasia said.
He also called for support from corporate individuals and organisations to establish a Cathlab ( Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory) at the facility due to the cost involved.
