When he arrived at the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) in Karachi, 28-year-old Arifullah was unable to work or care for his children due to a heart condition he had been living with since birth. An operation at another hospital had failed to help him, but a successful surgery at AKUH restored him to health, and he now supports his family as a rickshaw driver.
With three-quarters of cardiovascular deaths occurring in low-and-middle-income countries, Arifullah is far from an isolated case, which is why AKU continues to work to expand access to world-class cardiac care.
In Nairobi, surgeons at the Aga Khan University Hospital’s Heart and Cancer Centre became the first in the region to use a diamond drill to unblock a coronary artery, a procedure that makes it possible to clear blockages that cannot be addressed by an angioplasty.
In Afghanistan, the AKU-managed French Medical Institute for Mothers and Children introduced adult cardiac surgery, building on its successful paediatric cardiac surgery programme. Beneficiaries include Bismillah Mohammad Yaqoub, 59, who became the first person in Afghanistan to undergo a successful on-pump quadruple bypass. “I am happy, healthy and back at work, thanks to Allah and FMIC,” Yaqoub said.
New programmes to develop cardiac specialists are moving forward at FMIC in Afghanistan and in Nairobi where fellowship training in cardiology is unerway. Also still to come is construction of the Centre of Excellence in Cardiac Sciences in Karachi, a new building that will increase clinical and research capacity.
In addition, the University is aiming to stimulate improvements in other hospitals’ cardiac surgery programmes. In the first presentation of such data from Pakistan, Assistant Professor Syed Shahabuddin and colleagues reported in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care that the mortality rate for patients undergoing a common form of elective open-heart surgery at AKUH in Karachi was lower than that in the United States.
Not only do the results show it is possible to provide world-class cardiac care in lower-income countries, but their publication provides other institutions with a benchmark for measuring their performance.
“We hope it will encourage others to publish their data and strive for improvements in performance,” the authors wrote.