In Feb 2019 we went on a very successful mission to perform Heart Surgery in Ghana and we performed procedures on 9 patients. The picture is of Thomas Boeteng and his wife. He has been a farmer all his life in Ghana, until he got severe aortic regurgitation and had to stop as he was getting so short of breath and could no longer provide for his family.  He was our first patient and he has made an excellent recovery and hopes to be back to farming very soon. 

https://www.ctsnet.org/article/daily-video-blog-medical-mission-ghana-february-23-march-1-2019


We now want to build on this success and perform a second mission in October 2019. Because of the huge generosity of our friends and the Tesside community we raised enough money for equipment for 2 missions last time and that is out there right now, but we just need to raise another £10,000 to allow a team of 16 to get out there to help again. 

It is an unsettling fact that Ghana, with a population of 28million people has only one functioning cardiothoracic centre in Accra, the capital, in the far south of the country. This unit itself struggles for funding and performs around 230 cardiothoracic operations per year of which around 70% are congenital heart surgery, and only 20% are for adult rheumatic heart disease. Over a 10-year period they have performed only 100 mechanical valve replacements, serving the whole population of Ghana. When we went to Kumasi in February we learnt that there are 200 patients who need lifesaving surgery right now to survive. 

It is also our long term aim to work with this unit to make them self sustaining in the long term and so they can offer heart surgery themselves and this would finally make a considerable difference to the burden of valve surgery disease in young adults in Ghana

Thank you very much for your help from all the team