To mark the anniversary a Heart Transplant Museum was unveiled at the facility in the Western Cape.
On Monday, 3 December 2007, the Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang commemorated the historical event by opening not only a museum but the first Paediatric Rheumatic Heart Disease Prevention Clinic, equipped with two new heart scan machines at a cost of R500,000 each.
Assisted by the Life Health Care Group, the new paediatric clinic will service youth from the townships of Langa and Bonteheuwel, where rheumatic heart diseases are said to be high among children.
The minister opened the clinic on behalf of the hospital, the Western Cape Department of Health and the University of Cape Town's department of medicine.
The museum was opened later in the day at the hospital's old building and a gala dinner was held in the evening for dignitaries, medical specialists, families of the first heart donor and recipient as well as potential financial donors.
Dignitaries included the Western Cape Health MEC Pierre Uys, University of Cape Town vice-chancellor Njabulo Ndebele, Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool, Cape Town Mayor Helen Zille and Dr Saadiq Kariem who is the Chief Executive Officer of Groote Schuur Hospital.
Dr Barnard became an instant worldwide celebrity on 3 December 1967 with the words “dit gaan werk” (It is going to work) when he performed the world's first heart transplant at the hospital. Barnard passed away in 2001 in Greece.
Dr Tshabalala-Msimang said Dr Barnard's brilliance as a cardiothoracic surgeon was critical in ensuring the success of the operation.
However, she added, this success would not have been possible without the skilled and committed team of surgeons, cardiologists, nurses and technicians who assisted the pioneering heart surgeon “on that very important day in the history of medicine”.
“They demonstrated that a developing country on the southern tip of the African continent could beat the rest of the world with this remarkable surgical feat,” the minister said.
She added that an important, yet at the time understated, role the team played a preparatory role for the first heart transplant was that of Hamilton Naki, a black South African who later received the Order of Mapungubwe in Bronze in a post-apartheid South Africa.
Naki, born in 1926 in the district of Centani in the Transkei, became a laboratory assistant and later learnt surgical techniques in Dr Barnard's laboratory. He eventually trained scores of surgeons from all over the world who later passed through the hospital's world-famous heart transplant unit.
The name of Naki, who died in 2005, has now been taken for the Hamilton Naki Clinical Scholarship - also launched on Monday night, which aims to support candidates who can demonstrate a commitment to academic healthcare in South Africa.
The first recipients of the scholarship, which will pay for doctoral or post-doctoral training for three years, were also named on Monday night and they are Dr Carol Hella and Dr Bongaesi Chiliza.
By 28 November 2007, the Heart Transplant Unit at Groote Schuur had recorded 516 transplants for 488 patients, including 17 heart-lung transplants.
More than 100 Groote Schuur Hospital heart transplant patients are alive and well, with the longest-surviving recipient receiving his first heart transplant nearly 28 years ago.
Article published courtesy of BuaNews
