A hospital in northern Australia is opening its doors for children and their families with congenital heart defects to see their heart patients.
St Jude Children’s Hospital is a small, four-bed, five-hour-long facility in the town of Mount Gambier in Western Australia.
It is open to anyone aged between two months and three years.
“The goal is to enable a very small number of patients to be seen by a cardiac surgeon, and then we will move on to other patients and see what happens,” St Jude spokesperson and cardiac surgeon Dr Joanna Johnson said.
Dr Johnson said the facility would be a new and unusual hospital to treat congenital defects.
“We’ve never done anything like this before,” she said.
“But there are a lot of very important heart conditions that we can do that would not have been possible without a heart transplant, for example, which is why we’ve done a lot on this particular heart condition.”
It’s really important to us to try and understand what causes these problems so we can make interventions that can hopefully help these patients live with better health.
“St Jude is not the only hospital that has opened its doors in Australia for the congenital hearts of children.ABC News reported in February that four other hospitals across Australia had opened their doors to patients with congenita laryngeal or congenital aneurysm.
Topics:heart-diseases,health,australia