A 13-member team of cardiologists from the Cardiac Transplant unit of the University of Calgary arrived in Guyana on May 4 to perform echocardiography at the Georgetown Public Hospital.
The team will be performing echo scans at the city hospital and is expected to be here until June 29, a report from the Government Information Agency (GINA) said.
“Echocardiography is a non-invasive procedure that uses two and three-dimensional ultra sound to create images of the heart to diagnose heart disease,” GINA said. “It provides information such as the shape and size of the heart, the identification of damaged tissues and the pumping capacity. It can also detect normal and abnormal blood flow through the heart along with a lot of other information.”
In 2012, government partnered with the university to establish the Echocardiography Programme at the GPHC. It was extended to the New Amsterdam and Linden Regional hospitals in 2013.
In March a team of cardiologists, headed by Professor Debra Isaacs, director of Cardiac Transplant at the university, visited Guyana to perform paediatric cardiac surgeries. The five-member team focused on paediatric cardiac surgeries and offered the capacity needed to conduct those surgeries locally.
