This November, a team of 21 medical specialists, including several from Children’s Hospital Boston, traveled to Kumasi, Ghana to care for children with congenital heart defects. As members of the non-profit organization Hearts and Minds of Ghana, the team is part of an ongoing effort to treat patients and train and educate local Kumasi medical professionals with the hopes that a self-sustaining pediatric cardiac center can soon be established in the region.
While in Ghana, members of the team blogged about their experiences. The following excerpt was originally posted in the Children’s in Ghana Blog. Full story »
by Childrens Hospital Boston staff on April 21, 2011
Nguyen teaches urology surgery techniques in Nepal in 2009
For over a decade, Hiep Nguyen, MD, FAAP has been traveling the world as part of a nonprofit surgical and education team, dedicated to improving pediatric urology in developing countries. As a pediatric urologist and director of Robotic Surgery Research and Training at Children’s Hospital Boston, Nguyen has visited countries like Nepal, Tanzania and Ghana, working with local surgeons and healthcare professionals to help them better identify and treat genitourinary problems in children before they become untreatable.
This weekend Nguyen will be leading a team of volunteer doctors and nurses to Kenya, where they will preform up to 12 urology surgeries a day. (About four times the daily average at even the busiest American hospital.) While seeing patients, Nguyen’s team will also be teaching African healthcare professionals the latest diagnosis and management techniques for pediatric urological issues so they will be better prepared to treat patients in their own practices. The following is a blog Nguyen has written in anticipation of his upcoming trip. Full story »
Cardiac surgeon Francis Fynn-Thompson, MD, has had a busy year. First, he and his patient Sara Dumas were featured on the ABC program Boston Med when he transplanted a new heart into Sara. Now, he’s back in his home country of Ghana, where he’s leading a team of doctors, nurses and volunteers in an ongoing mission to perform much-needed open-heart surgery on children with complex heart conditions in a country with no pediatric cardiac surgeons.
Follow the efforts of the team as they blog from the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, Ghana. They’ve already gone through the grueling decision day (where the doctors and nurses decide which children are good candidates for surgery and which are not) and have operated on the first group of patients. Now begin full days of surgery, recovery and evaluation on kids whose lives will be changed forever by the Children’s team.
Dr. Fynn-Thompson and his mission to Ghana were featured on Good Morning America in 2008. Read the story and watch the piece by Dr. Tim Johnson here.
And, here, watch a video, created in the spring of 2008, in which Dr. Fynn-Thompson describes the mission.
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