In July earlier this year, Professor Jeremy Chapman gave a lecture on ‘renal transplant’ at SIUT (Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplant) in Karachi.
He was accompanied by doctors and medical experts including nurses, anaesthetists, surgeons and ultrasound specialists from Australia.
Since the last six years, he is visiting Pakistan to share knowledge and expertise in the areas of Renal Transplantation, Urology and Nephrology.
But his inspiration to visit the South Asian country lies in the commitment of the local doctors at SIUT.
Professor Chapman, who is one of the in kidney transplants, terms it an “amazing place with amazing people.”
Talking to SBS Urdu the renal expert says that SIUT is one of the “top places of transplantation in the world by volume”, doing about 400 – 500 transplants a year. Compared to that, Westmead Hospital in Sydney carries out about 100 – 120 transplants a year.
Kidney treatment at SIUT, Karachi. Source: Supplied
“We have a teaching program that we conduct in Pakistan. We take about 4 or 5 people from Sydney, to go to Pakistan and visit Karachi, to spend from a week to a month at the institute and to work with the team there.
“SIUT has some of the most up-to-date equipment and processes and people, and it has huge volumes of experience.
“They bring in to the country what’s needed, which helps in terms of surgical techniques, in terms of medical medicines, and investigative techniques in terms of pathology and pathology testing.
We can’t teach them how to do a surgical transplant but we can have a conversation about how we follow them up or how we deal with particular complications.
“When I go to SIUT, I do ward rounds, I go to clinics. When my surgical colleagues go they go to the operating theatres. We all give lectures and we all spend time with our colleagues over there.
The Australian team also shares knowledge of specific procedures and treatments currently not being used in Pakistan.
“If there is a high-risk patient for full anaesthesia and the surgeon wants to operate on the arm, to create a fistula for the dialysis we could use regional anaesthetic.
“We put a local anaesthetic in the shoulder, which blocks the arm. This wasn’t something they were doing in Karachi before.”
“Our anaesthetist did a number of demonstration cases teaching operating lists for a week to teach them the skills of how to do regional anaesthetic.
What we bring is not only immediate contact but the long-term ability to help with publication and research.
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Founder of SIUT thanks the Australian doctors for their volunteer work
Talking to SBS Urdu, Dr Adibul Hasan Rizvi says the visits are extremely beneficial for our staff and for the patients.
“The visit by Australian doctors is very educative, there is an exchange of thoughts and we gain an understanding of the advanced technologies in the renal field.
As this process is going on for some time now, we are glued up technologically with the Australian team.
They consist of physicians and surgeons. The physicians help us with the technology while the surgeon team works with us on various cases and sometimes they introduce new techniques.
We are learning a lot from the Australian team of medical experts especially in teaching and training.
Professor Jeremy Chapman (2nd from left) with Australian health experts in Karachi, 2016. Source: Supplied
“Urologists from the UK, surgeons from Ireland, physicians from the US and my team from Australia, he [Professor Rizvi] has brought great experts from outside.
