Mozambique: Caring for children with cardiovascular disease
Programme Coordinators: Professor Daniel Sidi (paediatric cardiologist, France), Dr Beatriz Ferreira (cardiologist, Mozambique)
The Maputo Heart Institute (MHI), created in 2001, is a non-profit private hospital. It is now financially autonomous, thanks to the diversification of its medical activities (general surgery, ophthalmology, orthopaedics, medical imaging, pharmacy, and medical laboratory services), allowing it to provide medical and surgical care to needy patients. The quality of its services and instruction and its relationships with large European and American institutions of cardiology, make the MHI an important establishment and a point of reference in the Mozambican healthcare system.
OBJECTIVES :
- To care for and operate on needy children with cardiovascular disease
- To train the Mozambican medical and surgical team in complex techniques
- To provide institutional support to the Maputo Heart Institute (MHI)
ACTIVITY :
- Complex cardiac surgery: children suffering from complex illnesses are operated on by La Chaîne de l’Espoir surgeons as Mozambican surgeons are currently only capable of dealing with relatively simple pathologies, VSD (Ventricular Septal Defect), Tetralogy of Fallot.
- Two interventional cardiac catheterization missions are organised each year, of which one is coupled with a cardiac surgery mission. About thirty children benefit from therapeutic procedures on each mission.
- Training in operating suites of various local medical personnel (perfusionists, nurse anaesthetists, anaesthetists, intensive care specialists, nurse executives, OR nurses, etc.).
- Patients are selected on Professor Sidi’s missions, along with postdoctoral instruction of doctors trained in paediatric cardiology.
- It is necessary to send disposable goods and instruments for 100 interventions for children in need.
