GUNTUR: Much to the delight of the patients, heart bypass surgeries were resumed at Guntur GGH on Monday after a long haul of four years.
The heart bypass surgeries were started in GGH in 2016, after entering into an MoU with Sahrudaya Trust for three years, which provided the required facilities, equipment and assistance to GGH doctors in successfully performing the coronary artery bypass surgeries.
As many as 540 heart surgeries were performed from 2016 to 2019, out of which over 150 were bypass surgeries. But in 2019, as the MoU ended, and followed by Covid-19 the next year, the Sahrudaya Trust couldn’t extend its assistance halting the bypass surgeries causing inconvenience to the patients, especially to those who couldn’t afford the treatment at private hospitals. In addition to this many staff members were shifted to Covid-19 duties due to staff crunch.
Identifying this, the director of medical education Dr Vinod Kumar has suggested the Sahrudaya Trust to restart their services and start bypass surgeries again in GGH. Following this, the trust founder and renowned heart surgeon Dr Alla Gopalakrishna Gokhale along with his team visited the hospital in December, inspected the existing facilities and discussed the same with officials in a review meeting. Though the officials planned to conduct surgeries from January, the work got delayed and a team of doctors successfully conducted bypass surgery on Monday.
Dr Neelam Prabhavathi said that with the assistance of Sahrudaya Trust, an action plan has been prepared to conduct as many heart bypass surgeries as possible in the next six months.