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CLINICAL CONNECTIONS RVC Clinical Services Newsletter Spring 2017
Dan Brockman, Professor of Small Animal Surgery and surgical team.
CARDIOTHORACIC SURGERY CAPACITY MULTIPLIES
The expansion of RVC Small Animal Referrals’ cardiothoracic surgery team is set to quadruple the number of canine mitral valve surgeries performed.
One of the most prevalent heart defects in dogs, mitral valve disease is still primarily managed medically, though for humans with mitral valve leakage, surgery is the standard therapy.The RVC is one of a few centres in the world to perform the procedure on dogs.
Dan Brockman, Professor of Small Animal Surgery, first performed open heart surgery at the RVC in 2005, and has worked alongside human cardiac surgeons and overseas veterinary surgeons to expand what the RVC can offer referral clients.
The RVC’s mitral valve programme has been supported by a team of pioneering clinicians from Japan, who have come over several times to help Professor Brockman operate. A perfusionist from the NHS has also been involved with previous open heart surgeries.The expansion of the RVC
team allows the service to carry out more surgeries without having a reliance on visiting clinicians.
The three new roles are Cardiothoracic Surgery Fellow, Cardiothoracic Perfusion Fellow and Cardiothoracic Theatre Nurse and Surgery Coordinator.The development enables the RVC to dedicate more time to screen animals to establish which dogs are good candidates for surgery, and to create a more structured mechanism for post-operative follow-up care.
The roles have been funded byThe Tailwaggers Trust. The Trust was a long-term supporter of the RVC, dating back to the 1930s, but it sadly ceased operations last year. A previous donation will fund the three new roles for the
first two years.The development should
enable the number of surgeries for mitral valve disease at the RVC to increase from around one each month to one a week ultimately, should demand exist.
Commenting on the scale of the problem of canine mitral valve disease and the benefits of making surgery available
to more dogs, Professor Brockman said: “We are very keen to take all sorts of both congenital and acquired heart defects but what we suspected, and what has been shown quite clearly, is that the number of dogs with mitral valve disease out there is huge.Therefore the demand for surgery is similarly very high. In humans, a leaking mitral valve is a not a medical condition at all but a surgical condition. Now that we can offer surgery, some of these dogs that have had a bout of heart failure, and we would expect to pass away within a year,
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