By Gladys Kila
Delivering cardiovascular services in Papua New Guinea still remains a challenge to this day.
This was a remark made by Interventional Cardiologist at Port Moresby General Hospital, Dr. Wesong Boko.
Dr. Boko was a speaker during World Heart Day commemorated yesterday at Port Moresby General Hospital. In his speech he talked about the clinical challenges in delivering cardiac services.
Dr. Boko said, heart treatment has been a challenge in the country for many years and to date.
For many years, clinical treatment was commonly used on heart patients and about 2 years ago, they were introduced to the invasive treatment for its heart patients.
“Invasive meaning we use stethoscope to hear heartbeats , however , we use machines to examine patients”.
Despite introducing the invasive treatment, Dr. Boko reveals that, the invasive treatment is complex and has a lot of challenges and one of the challenges he highlighted was Human Resource.
Dr. Boko said, as World heart day is observed, it is an appeal to the responsible stakeholders such as the government, National Department of health and Port Moresby General Hospital Management to take into consideration, the need to train more human resource that will enable them to maintain the facilities and also create more positions to cater for medical workers in the country.
“The second challenge we encounter is equipment’s to give services and that includes consumables”.
However, Dr. Boko said, despite all these challenges encountered, the partners of Cardiothoracic Society of Papua New Guinea have played an important role right from the start to support the society at Port Moresby General Hospital to provide cardiovascular services.
