-
[File Image]: Medical workers performing a transplant in a hospital.
The Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Cape Town celebrated its 300th kidney transplant this past week.
This marked a milestone for the paediatric hospital, a leading centre of child health in the country, that first opened its doors in 1956.
The hospital performed its first renal transplant in 1968.
Head of Nephrology and Solid Organ Transplant, Professor Mignon McCulloch have expressed gratitude to family members who came forward and donated their loved one’s organs.
She says number 300 was followed closely by two more transplants, with all three young patients heading home this weekend with new hope.
“We are very grateful, as are our paediatric patients and their parents, for giving these children a new lease of life and getting them off dialysis. All three of them were on dialysis for a long time. We are also grateful that we have such a wonderful great teams at Red Cross and Groote Schuur, including surgeons, paediatricians, dieticians, social workers, nurses, intensivists, anesthetists, managers and the list goes on. And we’ve realized that it really does take a team for successful transplant in children,” says McCulloch.
