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Tamil Nadu-Chennai
By Our Staff Reporter
The violin maestro, Lalgudi Jayaraman, and his wife, Rajalakshmi Jayaraman, presenting a bouquet to the cardiovascular surgeon, Apollo Hospitals, M. R. Girinath, in Chennai on Tuesday. Mrs. Rajalakshmi Jayaraman was his 25,000th patient to undergo a heart surgery. Looking on is the chairman of the hospital, Pratap Reddy.
Beginning with 100 surgeries in his first two months at the Apollo Hospitals, Dr.Girinath went on to wield the scalpel on 25,000 patients, and kept the heart beating in babies merely two days old and men as old as 88 years. His count of 25,000, included 15,000 coronary bypass operations, 4000 valve repairs and replacement, around 5,000 operations for a congenital heart disease and five heart transplants. Impressive statistics, but as Dr.Girinath himself pointed out, "There is much more to be done". The demand and supply gap with regard to heart surgery had never been bridged in India, said the chief cardiovascular surgeon, Apollo Hospitals here. With merely 55,000 open heart surgeries being performed per million population in the country, a great deal of work remained to be done. Coronary heart disease evolved into one of the biggest problems today, with about 12.5 per cent of the adult male population suffering from it. Augmenting the number of surgeries performed every year would be the course to take, but there were several impediments, Dr.Girinath said. The hurdles, which had to be crossed, included high cost of setting up new units and surgical disposables, lack of adequate professionals and the slow growth of medical insurance. Coronary heart surgery remained expensive and thereby, out of reach for a vast majority of the population. He and his team of professionals performed 32 surgeries entirely free of cost under the Chief Minister's `Idhayam Kappom' scheme and 15 operations under the Save A Child's Heart Scheme, which extended free service to poor children. In addition to his skills on the operating table, Dr.Girinath has also been instrumental in training over 30 surgeons and establishing the cardiac surgery programme in Sri Lanka and Africa. More recently, over the last two years, his experiment with the beating heart surgery has worked well and yielded a much better success rate. Since 2000, when Dr.Girinath and his team began using the beating heart surgery, the mortality rate has dropped significantly to merely 0.7 per cent. Feting the achievements of the cardiac surgeon, the Apollo Hospitals chairman, Pratap C.Reddy says, "Dr.Girinath has a unique gift — the ability to guide the ill back to health. We treasure this ability and the world of health care is made stronger by his presence." Accepting a plaque of appreciation from the hospital, Dr. Girinath, who has also been honoured with the Padma Bhushan and the Dr. B.C.Roy National Award, acknowleged the support of the entire Apollo team. His 25,000th patient, Rajalakshmi Jayaraman, wife of the violin maestro, Lalgudi Jayaraman, was present.
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