SALT LAKE CITY — On their first trip since the pandemic began, a team of doctors from Utah has been able to help babies and children in need of life-saving care in Gaza, in a way that’s positively Utah.
“It’s incredibly inspiring to work with such humanitarians,” said Steve Sosebee, president and founder of Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, or PCRF.
A team of medical professionals from Utah and across the country, traveled to Gaza to operate on the hearts of babies and kids who were between 6 months and 12 years old. They give their time, away from work and family, to save lives in a dangerous part of the world.
They really struggle to have access to health care in Gaza, so they had reparative cardiac lesions that would either limit their life span or impact their quality of life,” explained Adil Husain, chief of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Utah and co-director of the heart center at Primary Children’s.
Through PCRF, he and a team of doctors spend about a week in Gaza. They screen patients, understand the diagnoses, and make everything is in place and plan for recovery – all in the short span of a couple of days.
“We structure the operations so that we do the tougher operations early on so that we’ll be there longer during those recovery time periods for those kids and we do the straightforward operations near the end because we know that recovery will be easier, so there’s kind of a method to that madness,” said Dr. Husain.
Dr. Husain, an ICU physician, 2 nurses, a physician’s assistant, and surgical tech, made the trip to Gaza. And it’s only because of these teams that these kids have a shot at life. Some of these heart procedures are ones we take for granted in the US, but kids don’t have access to them in other parts of the world.
“A lot of these kids have holes in their hearts, or they have connections in their hearts that are allowing blood to mix in a way that impacts their oxygen levels or impacts how efficient their hearts are working. And these are things that we close pretty easily, or we repair pretty easily in us, yet there, their life expectancy is cut far shorter,” said Dr. Husain. “And so, it’s very satisfying because you’re able to address what we would deem as fairly straightforward medical problems, but for them, are very complex because of a lack of access. So, we can really change a lot of lives in a short amount of time”
Another advantage of the trip is for doctors and nurses from places here like Primary Children’s, to teach medical professionals on the ground in Gaza techniques and procedures to save lives, so families aren’t solely reliant on visiting doctors.
“Every child who gets who needs treatment that's not available locally has to have a permit to travel outside, and only about fifty percent of those permits are ever issued,” said Sosebee. “So a lot of these kids don't get the opportunity to travel outside for care, and a lot of that care isn't available locally because of the health system just not being developed and not having the resources to develop.”
Dr. Husain, who has made over 10 trips to the Israel-Palestine area, adds that being able to give back, reminds him of why he got into this profession in the first place.
“Over the years, it’s actually been a gift to me,” said Dr. Husain. “For a lot of reasons, it’s given me a pretty profound degree of perspective of what we take for granted. Not just day-to-day living here in the U.S., but as healthcare providers, the access that we have to technology and the types of environments that we’re able to provide care in.”
“We can have it make a difference, and can have a significant impact on humanity, and to make a positive change uh when things look very dire and difficult as they do today,” said Sosebee.
