The equipment – which includes an artificial ECMO machine, a portable cardiac ultrasound machine and a ventilator – is intended to help raise the hospital’s surgical capacity to 35 surgeries per month and increase the success rate of open heart surgery to 98%.
The hospital, located in the central province of Thanh Hoa, is the seventh to receive equipment from the ‘For Children's Hearts’ programme founded by Viettel and Vietnam Television, which aims to enhance hospitals’ capacity to carry out heart surgeries for children.
Each year, 500 children in Thanh Hoa province need heart surgery, while its children's hospital is able to perform only 250 surgeries. It is expected that the donation will facilitate the performance of an additional 100 heart surgeries annually at the hospital.
After five years of operation, the ‘For Children's Hearts’ programme has received VND100 billion in donations to fund surgery for nearly 2,000 underprivileged children with congenital heart diseases nationwide. In addition to equipping hospitals with necessary machines, the programme also provides training courses abroad for medical staff.
Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that about 16,000 children are born with congenital heart diseases in Vietnam each year, of whom 50% require surgical intervention. However, the number of children who undergo surgery each year has stagnated at about 5,000. The rest have to wait in line, and unfortunately many die while awaiting surgery.
