Our Travels

Cardiac Mission to Choray Hospital in
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, October 2009

Click here to read the full Report by Robert M. Jarrett, MD – President Hearts Around the World, Inc. describing the trip during October 16th to October 24th.
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Inaugural Medical Trip to Vietnam.

One of the important elements of success in this model is the fact that it begins with a level of care, respect and commitment that is rare for other international organizations. While building these can take time, the outcomes for lasting change merit the effort. Dr. Jarrett and his team know that they must work one country at a time. For now, the country they are focused on is Vietnam. Just as in Russia, Vietnam has a large, under-funded, centralized medical infrastructure with hard working but under-trained medical teams and an enormous gap between the care needed and the care received.

Choray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City is a 1,400 bed facility that daily attempts to meet the needs of 2,800 patients. Specific to cardiac care, there is a list of 3,000 people waiting for surgery who cannot afford the procedure. Unfortunately, doctors can currently only perform 200 operations a year on patients who require financial assistance. Adding to this growing need is the fact that rapid urbanization is less supportive of healthy life styles. More than half of the men in Vietnam smoke and the cost of purchasing cigarettes is large relative to the per capita income of $726 a year.

Diets have also changed with the healthier fish, rice and vegetable traditional diet being replaced by the Western fast food diet of fat, salt and sugar. Experts have warned that these changes are making cardiovascular disease a much bigger challenge than previously thought. Finally, childhood strep infections, which are easily treated in the West with antibiotics, more often result in rheumatic fever in Vietnam. This means that more people develop rheumatic heart disease with its resulting valve damage.

Poor dental care also adds to the increase in heart disease and can often be the result of poor diet and hygiene. Clearly, as in Russia, the need for more training, mentoring and support is needed in Vietnam.
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Hearts Around the World, Inc. sponsored its first international medical program to Saigon, Vietnam on November 7th, 2008. Dr. Jarrett led a four person team which worked at Choray Hospital - a 1400 bed tertiary referral hospital serving 40 million people in South Vietnam.

Accompanying Dr. Jarrett on this mission were Dr. Jeremy Asnes, a pediatric interventional cardiologist at Yale University, Nancy Rollinson, a pediatric cardiac nurse practitioner and Dr. Alicia Chaves, a pediatric cardiac fellow.

They helped teach the Vietnamese physicians some of the latest techniques of repairing congenital heart defects with catheter techniques rather than open heart surgery.