Kauvery Heart City inaugurated a customised heart failure clinic and ancillary heart and lung transplant services on its Cantonment premises on Friday in a bid to bring high-quality cardiac care to Tiruchi.
The clinic is expected to treat patients for end stage heart failure, and also prepare the ground for improving heart and lung transplant surgery rates in and around Tiruchi.
It was inaugurated by K.R. Balakrishnan, Director, Cardiac Sciences and Chief Cardiothoracic and Transplant Surgeon, and K.G. Suresh Rao, Head, Cardiac Anaesthesia and Cardiac Critical Care, Fortis Malar Hospital, Chennai.
“We are looking at patients with end stage heart failure who cannot be treated with conventional medical therapies. We are trying to take Tiruchi to the standard of bigger cities with this clinic,” said T. Senthil Kumar, executive director and chief cardiac surgeon.
In the three-stage process, the new clinic will first try to treat heart patients with available means, and then try assisstive devices such as Automatic Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator (AICD), Cardiac Resynchronisation Therapy (CRT), Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) and destination therapy like total implantable hearts.
The third stage will involve enrolling patients on the transplant waiting list. “If they are medically unable to wait for the transplant, they will be given bridge transplants,” said Dr. Kumar. A bridge transplant is an organ or surrogate device used to stabilise a patient before definitive transplantation of a matched organ.
S. Chandrakumar, Managing Director, was present.
