I will be traveling with a team that will be performing reparative surgeries on patients with congenital heart disease. During this trip, I will also be teaching the local team about congenital and acquired heart disease as well as how to manage the patients postoperatively. I will be working closely with a team of intensive care nurses as well as a pediatric cardiovascular surgeon.
This trip is one of several in a hope to continue to build the local program by capacity building as well as eventually help the local team towards a goal of building their own pediatric cardiac program that is sustainable. Sustainability is of key importance in that we are also teaching ourselves how to manage the critically ill children with the resources that are available.
The children that are selected for the corrective surgeries are patients that have congenital defects that can undergo a complete repair without need for further intervention in their lives versus if they do not have the repair and would eventually succumb to the long-term sequelae of unrepair cardiac defects.
The different this trip will make is for the local medical team's education as well as the literal, saving of children who would have otherwise died. With this team who seeks to continue to capacity build for this commmunity, these kids can go on to live long healthy and productive lives.
The local team of medical professionals as well as the children with congenital heart defects will be the population that will benefit the most from this trip. However, I have been practicing medicine since 2007 and continue to learn myself in the resource limited settings and continue to be in awe of the resilience of these children and their family.
I want to work with this population because without this team, the children have no other choice and would die from cardiac defects that could easily be repair in a higher income country.
The impact of this trip, including the ones in the past and moving forward, is to build a local team who can care for these patients in the preoperative and postoperative setting. The surgical team trains the local surgeons, the anesthesiologists train the local anesthesiologists, the perfusionists treat the local perfusionists, and so on and so forth. My teaching is targeted for local nurses and physicians that are assigned to me in the intensive care unit. Learnings are carried forward through regular virtual education through a friend and colleague of mine at University of Maryland.
This trip had two goals. The first was to diagnose and surgically repair pediatric patients with congenital heart defects who would otherwise die from the defect if left unrepaired. The second was to engage and invest our time and teaching to the local team that included physicians and nurses. We used the trip to do both of these missions as this is one of several that has been conducted at this particular location.
