THE National Referral Hospital (NRH) and Nanfang Hospital of China are making headways in their collaboration to provide non-invasive urological surgeries at the National Referral Hospital and also non-invasive urological surgical training for NRH doctors.
Medical specialists from the Nanfang University were in Honiara recently to train Solomon Islands doctors and provide non-invasive urological service and training and before the departure last week, they and their NRH counterparts participated in the China (Guangdong)-Solomon Islands Urology Minimally Invasive and Educational Cooperation Forum.
The forum discussed members how the medical cooperation can be further enhanced in urology and other medical fields to enable NRH to start providing tertiary care.
Dr Malefoasi told Solomon Star at the conference that,” the Nanfang Medical Specialists come every year to NRH to provide training and service and that the service provided is non-invasive urological surgery.
“This group is different from the China Medical Team from the Wuzhou University which has a full-time presence here. This group comes every year to provide training and service.
“The service they provide is non-invasive urological surgery. This means the urological service they provide does not involve blades and does not require a big operation. It only involves laparoscopic tubing.
“So yeah, they only use fiber tubing, which is pushed through the urethra to resect the enlarged prostate.”
Dr Malefoasi said prostate enlargement and prostate cancer are now on the rise amongst older Solomon Islands men and hence the urological specialist service and training provided by the Nanfang Hospital Medical Specialists at NRH is timely.
He said the plan by the Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MHMS) now is for NRH to start providing tertiary care or sub-specialist care and the three main areas in tertiary care they are eyeing are cardiology (heart), renal (kidney) and genitourinary (urinary and reproductive system).
“If you look at these three areas, they are Non-Communicable Diseases – Diabetes Type 2. Sub-specialist care has never been provided here before in these three areas. Services provided in these areas were only at a general scope. So, the programme here is to discuss how sub-specialist training and services can also be extended to these areas going forward under this collaboration.”
Dr Malefoasi said one positive aspect of this collaboration is that the Nanfang Hospital specialists train NRH doctors to provide sub-specialist care at NRH.
He said the sub-specialist care procedure are very sophisticated and needs more manual skills, coordination to carry out surgeries and hence NRH is appreciative of the training and services of the Nanfang Hospital Medical Specialists.
“Before when a surgery is conducted on very deep prostate, patients experienced high loss of blood as prostate is a highly vascular organ that when interfered with can heavily bleed.
“One of the prostate surgery complications is bleeding, which can result in death. Otherwise, with the sub-specialist service in urology, it is a very clean, very careful, very neat procedure done through a laparoscope and this time we have Dr Rooney Jagilly, Dr Augustine Melly, Dr Walter Leamana and Dr Malisa Lam Kohia who are currently trained to do this.
“According to our plan, we are to send more doctors to Nafang Hospital and we also need to train nurses. We also plan to train bioengineers because the level of medical technology will change. There lots of electronics that are IQ web-based and so these kinds of trainings are crucial,” Dr Malefoasi said.
By DELI-SHARON OSO
Solomon Star, Honiara
