Emmanuel Nlewedum, Port Harcourt
There is now hope at the University of Port Harcourt for patients suffering from chronic heart diseases in Rivers State and Nigeria in general.
The Chairman, Medical Advisory Council, CMAC, at UPTH, Professor Datonye Alasia, gave the assurance during the UPTH monthly Ground Round which features one special medical challenge, with the January 2025 edition featuring Cardiovascular challenge and breakthroughs in the centre of excellence.
The January 2025 edition of the UPTH Ground Round also disclosed the collaboration between the hospital management and a Cardiovascular Foundation in the United Kingdom, to set up a pacemaking unit that inserts a pacemaker in the skin to help an ailing heart.
As part of the partnership, the United Kingdom based cardiovascular foundation had sent a team of doctors to Rivers State, Nigeria for a one-week training for cardiologists and physiotherapist on modern techniques in treating heart ailments at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH).
The team of doctors from the UK Foundation, led by Dr Neil Grubb, a Cardiac Electro-Physiologist and Jagdeep Singh, Cardiologists and Cardiac Device Implanter trained Nigerian doctors drawn from across the country on pacemaker implantation, Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy amongst other techniques.
Explaining their mission in Nigeria, leader of international health experts, Dr Neil Grubb said they were on a medical mission to Nigeria to teach doctors and nurses on cardiac techniques, noting that they have also carried out free treatments for 22 patients at the UPTH.
Grubb noted that the background to the mission is the fact that many patients in the country are dying from treatable ailments because of lack of access to care and the poor healthcare system in Nigeria.
“The main aim of our mission is not to threat patients although we love to treat patients and the patients we treated this week undoubtedly benefitted from the treatment they received, but the main thing is that we want to leave a lasting legacy in Nigeria which means that we are spending as much time teaching as we are spending in actually doing the procedure itself.
“We are trying to train a generation of physiologist and cardiologist through this machines to Nigeria and we are hoping that with this machines in Port Harcourt teams will be coming three to four times a year by rotation because we need to train staffers,” Grubb stated.
“The background to this is that here in Nigeria you do not currently have a well developed healthcare system as ideally, you should have though there are pockets of expertise in Nigeria where medicine is practiced extremely well but there are also areas where patients are denied treatment just because of lack of resources, many patients are completely unable to afford any form of medical treatment and you know that some people are dying of conditions that can easily be treated,” he added.
He further explained that pacemaker is a device implanted in the heart of persons with abnormally slow heartbeats, adding that the devices can be checked from time to time to ensure that they are functioning optimally and the patients are doing well after implantation as a team of doctors have been trained at the UPTH to keep checks on the patients.
“So pacing is a technique that we use to plant an electronic device under the skin of the patients, attached to wires connected to the heart. They have to be guided using x-ray cameras and it requires special trainings to implant these devices. They are also quite costly but they are also a lot of wastage in western healthcare, so we are using some of the devices that cannot currently be used in hospitals in the United Kingdom and instead of wasting and throwing them away, we brought them across here where they can be used for the benefit of people here,” he explained.
On his part, Chairman, Medical Advisory Committee (CMAC), of the UPTH, Professor Datonye Alasia,
told Journalists that the Pacemaker project was part of Strategy Plan to grow specialist services in the UPTH.
He said the UPTH is collaborating with the UK based foundation to create a specialist hub, stressing that with the training of doctors and physiologists at the hospital, persons who travel out to other countries to seek care can now access such care at the facility and others in the country,
He said, “Collaboration is key in the strategy, and PPP is the way to drive it. We look for where the support can come from. We are driving skills set. Next year the scheme will be bigger.
“We are bent on creating a specialist hub. The cost of these specialist services is high but we work hard to beat it down. The minimum anyone can get pacing is $20,000. We started this pioneering work in 2018 with grants and some 77 patients in West Africa. Now, most of the mission work is on the scheme in UPTH.”
He hailed the success of the project and said the team had it in 2024, now again in 2025. “Training is a key benefit of this scheme. We have medical experts who came from around Nigeria. This is creating a form of medical tourism because people come from around Nigeria to attend to what we do here. Some 22 patients are in this scheme and it costs about $20,000 or N10m.
“One of the things we want to achieve is to bring access of super specialized services to the people and you know that most patients in Nigeria will pay out of pocket and most of this services are not services that a certain socio-economic bracket would be able to afford.
“So the takehome message is to be aware that there is hope and there is access for care for patients who have advance cardiac diseases and that those services are available in University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital and even within our local environments and that we have competent staffs, networks and collaboration to provide access to those services and some may also be lucky to benefit from these missions assuming they were not able to afford them,” Alasia said.
He also called for support from corporate individuals and organisations to establish a Cathlab (Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory) at the facility due to the cost involved.
Responding, Director of Medical Services at the Rivers State Ministry of Health, Vincent Nwachukwu, who said he was tapped from the UPTH, described the heart as the life of any human.
Nwachukwu hinted that the administration of Governor Siminalayi Fubara may give an ear to the appeal for establishment of a Cathlab at the hospital.
He said the Rivers State government may intervene if the case is properly made to the government, promising that the Ministry would evaluate the case and probably make a case to the state executive council.
He thanked the UK team for giving free support worth millions of naira to Rivers residents and Nigerians by extension.
