First Trip

During two weeks in February 2010, 45 health care professionals from Inland Northwest hospitals traveled to Rwanda and performed 16 open-heart surgeries. The group, Healing Hearts Northwest (HHNW), is a division of UJAMAA Medical Connections, a non-governmental organization founded by Dr. Pam Silverstein and Adie Goldberg. They started UJAMAA in 2007 to extend health care, education and training to international communities. Since its inception, their focus has been on Rwanda, a country of 11 million people that was decimated by the 1994 genocide. Nearly 800,000 people were murdered, while 75 percent of the medical profession was either killed or fled the country.

The 16 patients-ages 9 to 35-predominately suffered from rheumatic heart disease caused by untreated strep throat. In December 2009, Dr. Tim Bishop traveled to Rwanda with Echo Technician Don Hadley on a screening mission to identify potential surgical patients which were then narrowed down to a list of 16 candidates and six alternates. The guidelines for choosing the candidates were based on a few provisions-namely: the acuteness of the disease, as they had to be sick enough to require intervention soon but not so sick that they would likely have a long recovery time as the team was on a two-week time limit; and the patients needed to be able to leave the ICU in a relatively short time, as there were only five beds in the ICU and eight in the step-down unit.

Nearly every HHNW team member remarked the rapid progress of the patients from surgery to ICU to Step Down. “Seeing the two youngest patients -Rebecca, 9, and Esther, 10- walk to Telemetry only one day after open heart surgery, was a highlight for the group,” disclosed Dr. Goldberg. “The kids’ ability to recover is amazing.”

“The goal of this trip was to aid some people that had no other options,” said Sally Lutz, one of the Respiratory Therapists on the trip. “As for the team members, we had two goals: To assist with the immediate issues at hand, but, and almost more importantly, to instruct and teach the staff at King Faisal Hospital so they can eventually care for their own, both in prevention of some cardiac conditions and correcting them as they develop.”

Considering the massive logistical effort that these missions required, the recent February trip in addition to the several others prove to be a great achievement for UJAMAA and altruism, in general. Spokane and Coeur d’Alene have reached out halfway round the world-8,700 miles, to be exact-to have an impact on both the Rwandan health care system and Rwanda’s greatest resource…its people.

Healing Hearts Northwest is now in the process of planning their second trip to Kigali in April of 2011. Our plan is to continue to perform 16 new surgeries, check on the progress of our last group of patients, and continue to promote the independence of the Rwandan medical staff.