On May 17, the University Medical Center Ho Chi Minh City announced that it had successfully performed a heart transplant on a 15-year-old patient.
The procedure marked the hospital’s 11th successful heart transplant and was considered a particularly challenging case as the entire consultation, coordination, preparation, and surgery process had to be completed within an extremely limited timeframe.
Prior to surgery, the patient was in critical condition due to end-stage heart failure. Echocardiogram results showed severely reduced cardiac function, placing the patient at high risk of rapid deterioration and death without a timely donor organ transplant.
On the afternoon of May 15, the hospital received notification of a compatible donor heart. At around 10:30 p.m. the same day, the donor organ was transferred to the operating room. By 11:45 p.m., the first heartbeats of the transplanted heart were recorded in the patient’s chest.
Following the operation, the transplanted heart functioned stably, and the patient continues to receive intensive post-transplant monitoring and care.
According to Prof. Nguyen Hoang Dinh, Deputy Director of the hospital, the greatest challenge of the operation was the extremely short preparation time.
“From the moment a suitable donor heart was identified until all procedures were completed and the organ arrived in the operating room, the team had only about three hours to prepare and mobilize nearly 100 personnel from multiple specialist teams, departments, and support units,” he said.
Professor Nguyen Hoang Dinh added that experience gained from the hospital’s previous 10 heart transplants, along with increasingly coordinated teamwork among medical units, played a crucial role in ensuring the 11th transplant was carried out safely and on schedule.
)
