This will be my third trip to Orafaite. I will be joining a team as one of the pediatric cardiac intensive care doctors. During this trip, we will be performing cardiac surgeries and interventional cardiac procedures on patients with congenital heart disease. I will be overseeing the postoperative care in the ICU. I will also be teaching the volunteer team and local team about management of these patients. Several of the defects that will be repaired will never need further intervention but if left untreated, would have led to continued morbidity and certain early death. The patients will grow up to be adults. My role is to continue this work and with this organization not only in-person but through ongoing virtual sessions. The goal is to eventually help develop a sustainable program in Oraifite such that our need there diminishes with time but in order to do that, we must go often and repeatedly and encourage capacity building with the resources that they already have.
The patients and the local medical team will be the population that receives the most immediate benefit. This population in particular would have several options in a high income country but because of where they live, we are the only option. It continues to astound me that children with treatable congenital heart defects are still dying from them. 1 in 100 live births in the Western world have a congenital heart defect. Helping these children become healthy and functional adults in any setting is my life’s main goal. Teaching the local team is of extreme importance because this type of mission is unlike others in that we want to eventually build a team that can perform the surgeries and interventional procedures as well as manage the complexity of the postoperative and post procedural physiology in the ICU.
The expected impact is to have 15-20 patients with repaired heart defects that can become functional adults. The big impact is to have a program working towards becoming independent after we have continued to teach them.
This is my second trip with VOOM foundation to Nigeria. The people that were impacted directly were the patients and their families. We were able to conduct several screenings and complete over 14 surgeries by the time I had left. We had the ability to teach the local nursing and physician teams through simulation prior the start of the surgical cases. We taught them scenarios involving common causes of cardiac arrest and methods of resuscitation with the resources that were available. As well as the local patients, families, and healthcare workers, the added audience to the trip that were indirectly impacted were the volunteers. Several joined the trip as first time volunteers on an international mission and learned entirely new and adaptive methods of postoperative management utiizing local resources.
