RIYADH: Saudi Arabian doctors are training their Indonesian colleagues in pediatric cardiac surgery, helping to increase access to pediatric cardiac care in the country’s northwest, the Indonesian Ministry of Health announced on Saturday.
The 22-member surgical team arrived at Adam Malik Central General Hospital in Medan, North Sumatra, last month under a residency program arranged by Saudi aid agency KSrelief.
They started by performing free cardiac surgeries on adult patients and last week switched their focus to children with congenital heart diseases, which often go untreated in Indonesia due to a lack of specialized wards.
An estimated 12,000 children are born with heart disease in Indonesia each year, but only half of them receive treatment.
“Our doctors and hospitals have the capacity to treat only 6,000 of the 12,000 patients per year. As a result, 6,000 children go untreated each year and many of them die,” Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said.
“We have been working with foreign institutions willing to send doctors to Indonesia, firstly, to provide services we are unable to provide in certain areas, and secondly, to accelerate the specialized training of our doctors to carry out much-needed procedures.”
The Saudi Arabian team consisted of surgeons, nurses, perfusionists and respiratory therapists from the King Faisal Cardiac Center in Jeddah and King Abdullah International Medical Research Center in Riyadh.
The knowledge transfer program, supported by KSrelief, supports Indonesia’s health system reform plan, which aims to enable all local government hospitals to perform open-heart and pediatric cardiac surgeries, which previously were outsourced to hospitals in the capital, Jakarta, about 2,000 kilometers away from Medan.
For many parents, like Romine Marpaun, the cost of travel is simply unaffordable.
Marpaung’s 15-year-old son, Binsar, was diagnosed with a leaking heart valve five years ago and was recommended to undergo surgery in Jakarta, but the family could not afford to send him to hospital.
He underwent surgery on Tuesday by the visiting Saudi Arabian team.
“Until now I have only taken Binsar for outpatient treatment. I have taken him to many hospitals,” Marpaun said.
“I’m grateful to the team of doctors who helped my child.”
