By Lilia Bacu | Project Leader
It's the exciting time of the year when Team Heart starts preparing for new trips to Rwanda. In the upcoming month, September 2017, the echo-training and screening team is returning to Rwanda for the third stage of the skill transfer program. They will lead a 2 week series of skill advancement for a cohort of about 12 NCD nurses. This will benefit the people of Rwanda as they will have the ability to independently screen and follow up our post-surgery patients. We are also in the middle of planning a 2/2018 surgery trip that will allow us to continue to offer life saving treatments to those suffering of heart-valve disease. Tremendous efforts are being made for these trips to happen as we continue to work with our Rwanda-based team and the Rwanda Ministry of Health.
As part of the mission to maintain a sustainable cardiac care program, Team Heart is working on a partnership with the University of Rwanda School of Medicine and Nursing. The goal is to collaborate on research projects to improve post-operative care in the community. Team Heart has changed many lives who subsequently returned to their communities and are able to be productive members of the society. There are however, patients who continue to need cardiac care and have limited resources to medications despite efforts to provide access to such treatments. Consider helping a patient by making a donation at: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/team-heart/
Another important update related to Team Heart's activity is our presence in the medical literature/publications. In the last few years we have extensively discussed and published information related to heart disease in the Sub-Saharan Africa. As a follow up to one of our publications from 3/2017 which addressed school age screening, David Adams, ACS, RDCS, RDCS, FASE from Duke University Medical Center and Team Heart member, provided a communication in July 2017 titled "Low Incidence of Congenital Bicuspid Aortic Valve in Sub-Saharan African Children" discussing the efforts made for international collaboration in identifying the incidence of congenital bicuspid aortic valve. We welcome these collaborative efforts and continue to support the hard work related to cardiac care in resource-poor settings of Sub-Saharan Africa. We are fortunate to have such a hard working team!
Stay tuned for our next report related to the exciting work we do in Rwanda. Help us build a cardiac care for the people of Rwanda.
Thank you.
Lilia and Artur Bacu
Team Heart Advisory Board
liliabacu@yahoo.com
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