Lubango – The Lubango maternity hospital, Irene Neto, is carrying out, for the first time in its history, surgeries on newborns to correct severe deformities, cases that were previously referred to Luanda, ANGOP learned.
Neonatal surgery is a subspecialty of pediatric operations, which consists of the surgical care of newborns with congenital malformations and for premature or non-premature patients, but who may present complications that require surgical treatment.
Neonatal surgery is dedicated to the care of newborn babies, up to 28 days old, and is a delicate area that requires specialized knowledge. The indication of it to a newborn depends on several factors, because in addition to the problem that needs to be corrected, it is necessary to evaluate the health status of the child, as a whole.
Speaking to ANGOP on Wednesday, the director of the hospital unit, Irina Jacinto, said it was a joint exercise with the central hospital of Lubango, which has the surgeons to carry out this clinical procedure locally.
The hospital is prepared and has already, according to the source, performed a surgery in November 2023 and may have others, so professionals are improving the practice, as it is a surgery that has a 'great' level of complexity and generates an even greater degree of material needs.
The manager admitted that neonatal pathology that needs surgery is a rare event in the unit, in which they register one to two cases/month and it is intended that it happens less and less, as most cases are linked to prenatal care, since it is at this stage that such anomalies are detected in pregnant women.
Irina Jacinto stresses that the maternity hospital did not have the means or resources to do so, so it sent patients to Luanda, on plane trips assumed by the hospital, with costs of no less than 500,000 kwanzas for each case.
“The first surgery was a bit of a scare, we had the pediatric surgeons from the central hospital who came to the maternity ward, and in 2023 we had the advantage of having an anesthesiology specialist. Once the conditions were met, we did it and we had a specialist in pediatric surgery,” she explained.
She said that this raises the question of what is missing and can be improved, so they are in the process of trying their best to improve the conditions in the operating room and the logistics, because neonatal surgery is not cheap, it often needs catheters and other materials to ensure the postoperative period.
Irina Jacinto added that the issue is not so much in the surgery, but the after, the support of the patient in an intensive care unit and everything they will need, an exercise in which they are working.
He pointed out that it is a milestone, as it prevents families from having to travel to Luanda or Namibia, with all the inherent financial costs.
Esophageal atresia among the most frequent pathologies requiring neonatal surgery
Irina Jacinto said that as a maternity hospital they receive newborns and some of them are born with pathologies that are life-threatening and many are incompatible.
Of the most frequent pathologies, the oncological surgeon highlighted esophageal atresia, in which the child is born with an esophagus that has no connection with the stomach and therefore has difficulties in feeding and in surgery a connection has to be made between the two parts.
She added that there are also cases of meningocele, when the patient has a ball in the spine, which has to be corrected by the neurosurgeon, as well as gastroschisis, when the patient is born with the viscera outside the abdominal cavity, as they are the most frequent cases that require immediate surgery.
“We had a case in Huíla of conjoined twins and they are now three years old. They were sent to Luanda and are one of our success stories. They stayed for two years until they grew up because there were parts of the body that needed to be separated and they have been completely separated and are alive,” she said.
She stressed that the province's potential is group work, they can count on professionals from other hospitals, within what is the health network to improve results, from the central hospital of Lubango, in the case of pediatric and general surgeries, to pediatrics in Luanda among other units.
The Lubango Maternity Hospital 'Irene Neto' is a tertiary hospital, part of the National Health System. It is framed as a provincial maternity hospital, providing care not only to patients from Huíla, but from the neighboring provinces of Namibe, Cunene and Cuando Cubango.
It was reinaugurated in March 2023 by President João Lourenço, after a year of works that requalified it, which implied new structures, which from the point of view of gains received a neonatal Intensive Care Unit (ICU), a more robust adult one, imaging services with other components such as a CT scanner, an x-ray and ultrasound equipment available in the emergency room and outpatient consultations. MS/MS/DOJ
