Surgical teams from the UK-based charity Healing Little Hearts are using point-of-care ultrasound to help accelerate recoveries and improve outcomes for paediatric patients with congenital heart defects.
Healing Little Hearts provides life-saving heart operations to babies and children across India who would not otherwise have access to treatment, as well as helping to develop local paediatric surgical programmes.
Dr Sanaulla Syed, a paediatric cardiac anaesthetist with the charity, commented: “Obtaining vascular access in small children can be difficult, and the availability of point of care ultrasound systems has revolutionised this practice. As the technology has improved, this has led to other applications, and we now use ultrasound for a range of diagnostic applications before, during and after cardiac surgery. Ultrasound-guided regional anaesthesia – specifically bilateral paravertebral blocks – can also significantly reduce the amount of opiates required for surgery, considerably shortening post-operative recovery times and offering improved analgesia.”
“When travelling to India with Healing Little Hearts, UK surgical teams are keen to maintain the same high standards we have in the NHS, and so we are grateful for SonoSite’s ongoing support in providing point-of-care ultrasound systems – such as the NanoMaxx – which we can easily take with us. The local surgical teams have been very interested in this approach and, with some teaching and guidance from visiting teams, have now begun to adopt the same practices in their own procedures.”
