Current News
Latest News from the Chris Barnard Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery!
The Cardiac Surgery Intersociety Alliance's 'Cardiac Surgery: Outreach Africa group' welcomes a team of doctors on a site visit from Hospital Central Maputo from Mozambique thereby formalising the memorandum of understanding between these two institutions.
The Chris Barnard Division is a small Division within the UCT Department of Surgery, comparable to other highly specialised disciplines such as Neurosurgery; it almost exclusively treats indigent patients who have no medical aid and as such are dependent on public hospitals. When the government shifted tertiary resources to primary health care in the mid 1990s Cardiothoracic surgery suffered significantly more drastic cuts in its staff and operating capacity than other disciplines. Viewed as an archetypical tertiary specialty that benefits few patients at significant cost, adult cardiothoracic operating lists at Groote Schuur Hospital were reduced to one third of the Division’s pre-1994 level in the course of the second half of the 1990s. Fearing a public backlash, authorities left the Division’s paediatric operating capacity as it was. However ...
Dr Paul Human has been awarded an Ad hominem promotion to Associate Professor. Professor Human joined the department as a joint staff member in 1986 and was appointed Deupty Director of the Cardiovascular Research Unit, where he heads Pathobiology Research, in 1997 and Director of Research for the Division in 2002.
Professor Deon Bezuidenhout has been appointed successor to Professor Peter Zilla as Director of the Cardiovascular Research Unit.
Dr Marius Barnard, brother of Christiaan Barnard and who assisted in the historic first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital on December 21, 1967 died on Friday, December 5 in Hermanus, South Africa, after a long battle with prostate cancer.