On September 21st, Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) medical team left for Luanda, Angola, to carry out the first SACH Cardiology Clinic in Angola.

The medical team comprised of Dr. Lior Sasson, Chief of Thoracic and Cardiac Surgery, Dr. Alona Raucher, Pediatric Cardiologist and Simon Fisher, SACH executive director, worked at the Luanda Children’s Hospital together with Angolan pediatric cardiologist Dr. Christina Gamboa.

Dr. Gamboa has a waiting list of 600 patients from all over Angola (a country with a population of 11 million people) in need of life saving heart surgery but there is no surgeon in the country to help these children.

The doctors equipped with the state of the art GE portable echo machine examined approximately 100 patients through three days of intensive work, the fortunate ones will travel to Israel for open heart surgery.

This new initiative has been made possible thanks to the Israeli Corporate group, L.R. that has already made it possible for five patients to travel to Israel for treatment. Two of the children, three year old Dalton Antonio Domingos and one year old Kadija Josefina Baptista returned with the team to Angola having undergone life saving surgery in Israel.

The team also visited the operating theatre and Intensive Care Unit at the Children’s hospital and has found it to be adequate for closed heart surgery procedures; there are dozens of children waiting for such procedures.