Kauvery hospital launches new surgical services

Dr K.R.Balakrishnan, director of Cardiac Services, Fortis Hospital, Chennai, inaugurates the heart failure clinic at Kauvery heart city at Tiruchy on Saturday. —DC

The City-based Kauvery Hospital has successfully performed over 25,000 angiograms and 5,000 angloplasties, of which over 40 per cent are primary procedu-res in the last ten years, ac-cording to Dr S.Chandraku-mar, managing director of the Hospital. Dr Chandrakumar told newsmen on the sidelines of launching a heart failure clinic, bridge to transplant, heart, and lung transplant programmes at the 'Kauvery Heart city' premises here on Saturday that on the surgical side more than 5,000 major cardiovascular surgeries have been done with "excellent out-come". He claimed that their hospital is one of the very few centers in Tamil Nadu which handles complex emergency cardiac procedures like ruptured ventricular septum (a complication of heart attack) and aortic dis-section (a complication of


hypertension), where if the patient is not operated within the first 24 hours, it usually results in death. Dr K.R. Balakrishnan, one of the pioneers in heart transplantation in India who has performed over 150 transplantations till date, inaugurating the new services said that with increasing awareness of organ do-nation, more and more or-gans are now available. However, less than 30 heart transplants were done every year in Tamil Nadu. The cadaver donors avail-able average around 75 per year over the past five years. Hence, there was a huge potential for increasing the heart transplant numbers, he said. Several eminent doctors and surgeons of the Kauvery hospital partici-pated in the function.