Transcript
A leading heart surgeon says the most difficult part of the mission was selecting the children to be operated on at a hospital in Lautoka. Kirsten Finucane is the Head of Department of Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Surgery at Auckland's Starship Hospital. Dr Finucane says they chose 19 children from 26, and that those who were picked now have a new lease on life.
Five days of operating is pretty full on and they are all doing very well at this stage. I'm always a little anxious about them for a few days after this but we are not out of the woods until we know that they are healed up and happily home but they are all actually really good. The intensive care is already closed and they are just all out in the ward and getting back to feeding and so on.
Dr Finucane has carried out well over 7500 heart surgeries on children in Aotearoa over a career spanning over two decades. She firmly believes heart surgery should be available to children from the Pacific, who would otherwise miss out. According to her, operating on children in the region is a very effective but simple thing to do, especially when heart defects are so common.
Fundamentally [I] don't believe anyone should miss out on that if we can possibly do it. And Fiji are our neighbours and that is the other thing so we live close by and we need to look after them. And of course many of them do make it to Auckland for surgery at the Starship hospital but the cost of doing that is quite high and government funding and organisations or charities that help to fund that have to put up a lot of money whereas we can do it in a much more cheap way by coming here.
Fijian Paediatric Registrar Losalini Ravulo Leweniqila says the impact of heart operations on the children and their families is life changing.
Our families are very happy and they feel the warm welcome that the team show in all the small gestures that the team give them. The nurses are very friendly to them and they are very accommodating and they all feel at home.
Dr Leweniqila says the children came from all over Fiji, and aged from 3 months right up to 13 years.
Most of our kids that get selected for surgery have come through a long way of screening so if they come through the hospital, they would have been picked up through their school or in the community.
She says the New Zealand medical team were extremely generous and hard working, but added that a lot of work went on behind the scenes to organise logistics for their mission. Heart Kids is a New Zealand charity which looks after children and their families. Alongside another charity, Heart4Kids, it has supported the surgical team's Fiji mission. Its CEO Rob Lutter says they provide an important lifeline.
There's not that much happening in Fiji and it's about supporting our heart kids over in the Pacific Islands as well as here in New Zealand. So we felt it was of great benefit to help the charitable trust in their role in providing surgery for these kids because if they didn't have this surgery some of these kids wouldn't make it.
The child patients will go through post operative care once they are back in their hometown villages. There are a few more children in Fiji who will have to come to New Zealand for their surgeries, to be paid by charity and government funding.
