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By Dominique Herman
It was an historic day for the Cape
Flats on Wednesday when at 9am, a 52-year-old fisherman's chest was cut open and
a triple coronary artery bypass graft (cabg) was performed at the newly opened
cardiac unit at Gatesville Medical Centre (GMC) in Rylands.
This is the
first cardiac unit to be built on the Cape Flats.
"This is the level of
sophistication in this community and the hospital's patients can now have First
World medical treatment in their environment near their homes," said cardiac
surgeon, Kobus Louw, as he was cutting a hole in the heart into which he would
insert a vein from the man's leg.
Louw, who has been a cardic surgeon for 15 years, is from
Johannesburg and trained there and in the United States. He moved to Cape Town
to work full-time at the GMC.
He credited Chris Barnard with creating "a
very good vibe about cardiac surgery in Cape Town", and said he wanted to serve
in the area as a result of Barnard's inspiration.
The state-of-the-art
unit, which cost more than R20 million to construct, features a German imported
Siemens Axion Artis ceiling-mounted, flat panel cardiac catheterisation machine,
that in every other cardiac unit in the country stands on the floor.
The
staff consists of four cardiologists who work in the cardiac catheterisation
laboratory where procedures such as placement of stents, angioplasties and
angiograms are performed; and four surgeons, three anaesthetists and four
perfusionists in the cardio-thoracic theatre. The hospital also has an eight-bed
cardiac intensive care unit.
The GMC is 18 years old and when it was
built, it was one of the first non-white-owned hospitals in the city. Its
current roster of specialist doctors are largely members of the previously
disadvantaged community.
According to hospital administrator, Mastura
Johnson, they applied to the provincial department of health two years ago to
install a cardiac unit. The application was rejected on the grounds that there
would be an oversupply of such facilities in the Western Cape and overall
standards would drop.
But after appealing to the national minister of
health, the licence was granted and the wing was renovated to comply with
statutory regulations of government standards for cardiac units.
The
cardiac catheterisation laboratory opened last Monday and had been busy, she
said, with the inaugural surgery - a planned procedure that took about five
hours - performed yesterday, followed by an unplanned cabg in the afternoon on
Samuel Groenewald, 54, from Bonteheuwel.
Groenewald had to have an
intra-aortic balloon pump placed in one of his arteries the day before as a
temporary measure and lay in bed reading a newspaper, "not nervous and feeling
all right", as he waited for his turn under the knife.
- This article was originally published on
page 4 of Cape Times on
July 14, 2005
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