Moon Desk: Saudi doctors are training their Indonesian colleagues in child heart surgery and helping expand access to pediatric cardiac care in the country’s northwest, the Indonesian Ministry of Health said on Saturday.

The 22-member surgical team arrived at Adam Malik Central General Hospital in Medan, North Sumatra province last month under a residence program arranged by Saudi aid agency KSrelief.

They began by performing free heart procedures on adult patients and last week switched focus to children with congenital heart disease, which in Indonesia often remains untreated due to a shortage of specialist wards.

An estimated 12,000 Indonesian children are born with heart disease each year. Only half of them are treated for it.

“The capacity of our doctors and hospitals is only 6,000 of the 12,000 each year. So, every year 6,000 children cannot be served and many of them die,” Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said.

“We’ve been collaborating with foreign institutions willing to send their doctors to Indonesia to, in the first place, provide services that we have not been able to provide in certain regions and, in the second place, to speed up the specialist training of our doctors to carry out the much needed procedures.”

The Saudi team comprises surgeons, nurses, perfusionists and respiratory therapists from the King Faisal Cardiac Center in Jeddah and the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center in Riyadh.

The transfer of knowledge program sponsored by KSrelief supports Indonesia’s health system transformation plan, under which all regional government hospitals should become capable of carrying out open-heart surgery and pediatric heart surgery. Until now, cardiac procedures on children have been referred to hospitals in the capital, Jakarta, which is nearly 2,000 km away from Medan.

For many parents, like Rominu Marpaung, the cost of travel is impossible to bear.

Marpaung’s 15-year-old son, Binsar, was diagnosed with a leaky heart valve five years ago and referred for surgery in Jakarta, but the family could not afford to send him.

On Tuesday, he was operated on by the visiting Saudi team.

“Up until now, I was taking Binsar only for outpatient treatment. I took him to so many hospitals,” Marpaung said.

“Thank you to the team of doctors for helping my child.”