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Canada-based team to help boost paediatric operations at CHI
By Sharmain Cornette
Paediatric operations at the Caribbean Heart Institute (CHI) may soon be elevated to another level with collaboration from the Kovalev and Friends Foundation for Kids, of Montreal, Canada. In fact a visiting team, headed by Paediatric Cardiac Surgeon, Suzanne Vobecky, arrived early yesterday morning and was locked in discussion with CHI’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Gary Stephens,.
Speaking to this newspaper, Dr Vobecky revealed that the Foundation is one which caters to children with heart diseases and has two missions which characterise its operations. One segment of the operations, she revealed, entails caring for children in Canada who are not fortunate enough to have all medical care available to them. As a result, the Foundation helps to give them an improved lifestyle despite of their heart conditions. Another role of the Foundation is to offer assistance to foreign countries.
From left: Dr Suzanne Vobecky, Mr Stephen Zatylny, Mr Walter Valentini, Dr Gary Stephens and Ms Catherine Litalien
“The Foundation facilitates as much as we can, the care of children in other countries who have heart problems as well,” Dr Vobecky related. And a decision to travel to Guyana, she said, was fostered through collaboration with persons who have been integrally involved with paediatric cases in the Caribbean, this case being Dr Stephens.
She explained that the goal of the foundation is not only to go to various countries and do surgeries and take care of children suffering from heart diseases alone, but also to help facilities and officials such as doctors and other medical professionals improve.
“If what we are doing here works out, we expect that a team from our country will come down here and work with the professionals here and give them some fine tuning and a learning experience…It is mostly about knowledge transfer,” Dr Vobecky asserted.
She was unable yesterday to predict a date by which the collaborative effort could yield the desired results, as the process is still in the discussion phase. However, she anticipates that a definite decision could be made by tomorrow after the team would have visited Barbados and Grenada to engage similar discussions.
The team made up of Mr Stephen Zatylny; Paediatric Intensivist, Catherine Letalien and the Foundation’s President, Walter Valentini, had travelled to Trinidad on Monday. They arrived in Guyana early yesterday morning and by early afternoon were headed to Barbados.
According to Zatylny, he became interested in the Foundation after Dr Vobecky had performed a surgery on his son some years ago back in Montreal. He said for several years now he has been working with a management health care company which deals with cases that are sent overseas.
“We coordinate these services, and in working with the Caribbean for the past five years, I noticed the need for paediatric heart care surgery and I learnt more about the foundation and I thought it was a good opportunity for them to get involved in the Caribbean.”
It was against this background he said that a “fact-finding mission” was planned to determine how best the Foundation could help with the provision of improved paediatric care in the Caribbean. The team was able to examine the CHI facility in its entirety and paid close attention to the recovering patients who have already been operated on as part of the historic paediatric open heart surgeries.
Walter Valentini related that the aim of the visiting team is to assess the situation in the various countries to see what areas are more crucial to be addressed.
“What I have seen so far (in Guyana) is very encouraging. Infrastructure is in place, equipment is in place and I think it may just be training of the health workers that would be our biggest goal…”
As part of Dr Vobecky’s medical team, Catherine Lietalien, who is usually charged with taking care of paediatric patients after surgery, was tasked with specifically assessing the human resource capacity at CHI. According to her, the intent is to ascertain the needful extent of collaboration and exchange of expertise in order to build a suitable paediatric intensive care team.
Dr Stephens had months ago revealed the intent of the Montreal-based team and has ever since signalled his enthusiasm to see the collaboration become a reality thereby boosting the level of cardiac service that is offered locally.
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