Cardiac Surgery Air-Bridging in the Caribbean

Cardiothoracic Surgery in the Caribbean

“…The challenges involved in these islands’ medical care range from low-resource institutions to lack of specialized care. In the field of thoracic and cardiac surgery, many limitations exist, and these include the lack of access to cardiac surgery for many small islands, little governmental funding, and limited health budgets for minimally invasive approaches in thoracic surgery [ 1 ] . The Caribbean is a region consisting of 44 million inhabitants.…”

“…Most of these islands are middle to high-income primarily, with a very small percentage of them being low-income islands. Despite the general “high-income” region profile of Caribbean islands, many difficulties surface with regard to both access to and quality of specialized care, particularly regarding cardiac and thoracic surgery [ 1 ] . Despite a great disparity between low and high-income islands, both cardiac and thoracic surgery have existed in the Caribbean for over 50 years.…”

“…The availability of cardiac and thoracic surgery is different from island to island. Most islands with populations over 500,000 perform video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) and have local cardiac surgical centers [ 1 ] . These include Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago.…”

“…In contrast, smaller islands are less likely to have cardiac and thoracoscopic surgery at their hospitals. Exceptions include the Cayman Islands (population of 65,000), which have been performing cardiac surgery since 2014, and Aruba (population of 105,000), which performs VATS [ 1 ] . These islands are supported extensively by their local governments, which facilitates technological developments in cardiothoracic (CT) surgery.…”

“…These islands are supported extensively by their local governments, which facilitates technological developments in cardiothoracic (CT) surgery. On the other hand, Haiti, a low-income island with 11 million people, has not been able to establish sustainable cardiac surgery, and thus relies on patient transfers and visiting cardiac surgery teams to meet the demands of CT surgical disease [ 1 ] . According to the latest classifications of the World Bank, high-income countries are defined as earning > US$12,370 gross national income (GNI) per capita, middle-income countries as between US$3,996 and US$12,370 GNI per capita, and low-income countries as < US$3,995 GNI per capita [ 2 ] .…”