Nurses the missing link for Cardiac Kids Foundation of Florida
Published:Friday | January 19, 2024 | 12:11 AMChristopher Serju/Senior Gleaner Writer
Having been a part of the Cardiac Kids Foundation of Florida missions to the Bustamante Hospital for Children since 2004, Professor Jeffrey Jacobs is impressed with the significant progress Jamaica has made in paediatric cardiac care since that time.
Talking with The Gleaner inside the reception area of the Cardiac Unit, the doctor recounted the difficulties they had been facing before the unit was built.
“This building has a lot of technology that wasn’t available before it existed. One piece is the catheter lab because when a baby has a hole in the heart or other problems with the heart most commonly it’s surgery where we open the chest and repair the heart. Many times to get the diagnosis right we put catheters in the heart to measure pressures and to figure out the best way to repair the heart,” he explained.
“Ten, 15 years ago there was no catheter machine at this hospital, so the children had to go somewhere else to get their catheter study,” he continued. “Now there is one in this hospital and it’s exactly right next to the operating room so the cardiologists and the surgeons can work together in the same operating room to take care of the children. If they are separated by 30 minutes in two different hospitals across the city, healthcare is not as good as it can be in one building.”
Jacobs noted how the acquisition of newer technology has also helped to solve logistical issues.
“The outcomes have been better and the ability exists to care for sicker children. Before this building was here, those sicker children needed to have their surgery done in another country. There are different levels of complexity of heart operations and with the presence of this building and a catheter lab here and all this critical knowledge right here, we can now take care of sicker children. Before, some of these sicker children, they would either die or they would have to go somewhere else. Now they can have their care here,” he said.
However, with all the state-of-the-art equipment and its own operating theatre, as well as a standout cardiothoracic surgeon in Dr Sherard Little, Professor Jacobs is concerned that these gains could be undermined by the absence of a critical cadre of support personnel – nurses.
“The problem was that Dr Little didn’t have an operating room. Now he has one and there is a catheter lab. Then we needed to have good bypass machines to run the open heart surgeries by putting the patient on the machine to pump the heart and we now have that, so the next gap is we need more nurse,” he admitted.
Professor Jacobs pointed out that 30 of the 50-member Florida team were nurses, and with good reason.
“I bring all these nurses to take care of the patients and when I leave all these nurses are out of here. So you can’t do all the operations that need to be done. So the gap right now is nurses. You need to find a way to have Jamaican nurses learn how to take care of patients that have heart surgery and get them to stay here,” he declared.
Professor Jacobs, who is director of the Andrews/Daicoff Cardiovascular Programme at Johns Hopkins, said having dedicated a cadre of nurses assigned to the cardiac unit would be building on the overall investment, which has been paying great dividends in terms of the many lives saved and the families healed.
“We have to be smart enough to say if we build this building, we get all this equipment and we have this surgeon, you have to find a way to get the nurses to want to stay here. We’ve got to find a way give them the appropriate salary differential that they are not tempted to leave the country,” Jacobs urged.