Giving Children a Future

Vibhu Kshettry, MD, cardiovascular, thoracic and cardiac transplant surgeon at the Minneapolis Heart Institute® at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, speaks with eloquence and conviction about the health challenges facing the developing world. Obesity and diabetes are on the rise, rheumatic heart disease (RHD) afflicts millions of children and young adults. Local surgeons, nurses and technicians are scarce, yet the need for skilled and sustained cardiovascular care is critical.

 

Having done volunteer heart surgeries in the developing world for more than 20 years, Dr. Kshettry knows few countries have the resources to establish a solid cardiovascular program. In 2005, he established the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation’s ICORE (International Cardiac Outreach, Research and Education) Program. ICORE's mission: provide life-saving surgeries for patients in the developing world, but also to teach and train local healthcare providers.

 

“We work in partnership with health care institutions in other countries and help them get on their feet,” says Kshettry. “We’re there to mentor them and partner with them. Whatever it takes to get them to the next level.”

 

In the seven years since ICORE has worked in the developing world, surgeons, nurses, technicians and perfusionists—who run the heart-lung machines—have given hundreds of hours of their personal time. ICORE has benefitted from $2 million in donated supplies and more than $100,000 in matching funds. The Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation helps secure these contributions.

 

Ethiopia is one of the countries benefitting from ICORE’s work. The Children Heart Fund of Ethiopia-Cardiac Center in Addis Ababa is the only cardiac center for the country’s 85 million people, but it has no cardiac surgeon, anesthesiologist or trained staff to run an ICU or operating room.

 

“The director of the center says that foreign teams do come to help, but what they were really looking for was an organization to take them under its wing and truly help them,” says Kshettry.

 

These needs fit ICORE’s mission perfectly. Kshettry travelled to Ethiopia with a bare-bones surgical care team and a crate full of supplies to help children with rheumatic heart disease (RHD). In Ethiopia, 60,000 children a year acquire heart disease, largely from rheumatic fever.

 

“RHD affects children at a very young age and if they do not get help, they perish," says Kshettry.

 

Within two weeks in Ethiopia, the ICORE team replaced 14 heart valves. One 13-year-old boy named Abele received three. He had strep throat as a child, perhaps many times, which went undiagnosed and untreated. The Streptococcus bacteria, which could have been stopped with $2 worth of penicillin, attacked his heart valves. As a result, he had RHD and was too weak to do much of anything, including playing his favorite game, soccer.

 

“This boy had been passed over,” says Kshettry. “Other teams had decided he was too sick to operate on. I knew he would not survive in his condition and I believed we could help him.”  

 

ICORE is committed to a four-year relationship with the Ethiopian center. Since their initial visit, the Minneapolis team members are staying connected with their colleagues via email, phone and Skype, and continuing their training with web-based teaching seminars and surgery demonstrations. Last summer, a nurse from the Ethiopian center spent two months at Abbott Northwestern Hospital learning how to run an operating room.

 

Tammy Castanias went with ICORE to Ethiopia as the ICU nurse and educator. She encountered an extraordinary eagerness to learn among the health professionals and a deep sense of gratitude from the patients and their families.

 

“Children with RHD can’t run or play or even walk to school,” she says. “Without valve repair or replacement, life is extremely difficult for them. But through ICORE’s work and the dedication of those at the center, I feel we can really change the future of an entire country, one child at a time.” 

 

You can learn more about ICORE’s work by contacting Anna Stier at astier@mhif.org.