Mitkovskaya: Belarusian heart surgeons are on par with world's best

“Belarusian cardiac surgeons broke into the global transplantation scene. At the moment we are among the top 10 countries of the world in this field, and we are ahead of other former Soviet nations. And this, of course, wins us a lot of respect among professionals from other countries,” said Natalya Mitkovskaya.

She drew attention to very good patient survival rates. “Currently, we are at the stage when we are expanding the range of recipients, that is, people who undergo this surgery. We take patients with a serious condition and at a very high risk of postoperative complications, those patients whose death rate is estimated at 20-30% even at the world's best heart transplant centers. We have recently celebrated a remarkable achievement - we were able to help a 9-year-old girl whose condition deteriorated very fast and very dramatically. We had to take her to the operating table urgently. There were many issues during the postoperative period. We received a lot of help from our colleagues - infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists, microbiologists, pediatricians. However, everything ended well, the girl was discharged from hospital,” the director of the health facility noted.

According to her, the waiting list for urgent cardiac surgery in Belarus is about 1.5-2 months. “This is an optimal workload for cardiac surgery to work uninterruptedly. The only field of cardiology where we still have a rather big waiting list is treatment of patients suffering from rhythm disorders. There are about 600 people on the list - this amounts to a year of work. Yet, I must emphasize: our specialists now work so hard that we expect to handle this queue much faster,” added Natalya Mitkovskaya.