Charity cycle race raises heart-surgery funds

Leighton Levy, Gleaner Writer

Approximately £15,000, raised through a charity cycle race around the island this past Sunday, will enable doctors at the Bustamante Hospital for Children to carry out seven critical heart surgery operations.

The money will also aid in the development of a cardiac heart-surgery programme at the hospital.

More than a dozen corporate entities, along with the Chain of Hope organisation that flies heart-surgery specialists into Jamaica to perform much-needed heart surgeries, staged the charity cycle race to help raise the money that makes the operations possible.

The efforts were spearheaded by Alan Barnes, managing director at Red Stripe. He and a team of riders pedalled their way around the island playing their part in raising the money.

"Specifically, we set out to raise the £15,000 that Chain of Hope needs for materials in order to carry out seven critical heart-surgery operations. Chain of Hope finds amazing doctors that will come over and carry out these operations without cost to the hospital or country. To these doctors and all the local staff involved, a massive thanks and big appreciation," Barnes said. "I am very happy to confirm that we surpassed this amount, with help from sponsors, and therefore doubled our target to £30,000. We increased our target because the management team at the hospital told us that the orthopaedics department also desperately needs funding for much-needed procedures and operations."

At a ceremony held at the hospital on Wednesday, where corporate sponsors handed over cheques to the Bustamante hospital chief executive officer, Beverly Needham explained that the donation would do much more than make the heart-surgery operations possible.

Timely donation

"This donation is timely as the cardiac-surgery programme is poised for development and we are happy that you are able to contribute to its development," Needham said. "As an emerging service, we envision that in five years the programme will be sustainable. That is, we will not have to depend on the visiting teams to do the bulk of the operations but that our local team headed by our own Dr Sherard Little will be able to do the majority of the cases on an ongoing basis at least three to five cases each week. Last year, 56 heart surgeries were done. Since the start of this year, we have done 48 surgeries and we have over 150 children on the waiting list for surgery."