In a talk with Prensa Latina, Rodríguez highlighted the work carried out by Cuban doctors in the children’s heart center of the pediatric Bustamante Hospital for Children in this capital.

This center is the only one of its kind here and in the English-speaking Caribbean, and it attends free of charge hundreds of children in this area who need open heart surgery, the clinical laboratory Master’s degree graduate and certified perfusion said.

She commented that the referred hospital has been receiving Cuban health professionals for more than 10 years, and currently has a brigade of 26 collaborators, most of them nurses who work in different areas.

‘Here, it had never been possible to do pediatric cardiovascular surgery until this heart center started working with the help of Cuba, which provided specialized medical personnel’, the collaborator from Havana said.

She said that since 2018 more than 400 children have been operated on in the Jamaican pediatric heart center where the presence of Cuban specialists has been vital.

In this sense, she described working with children as a challenge, since as a clinical perfusion assistant she only had experience with adults in the cardiovascular surgery service in ‘Hermanos Ameijeiras’ hospital in Havana.

‘In Jamaica I have had to cross the language and culture barrier, which has made me outdo myself every day, as I work with a multinational surgical team’, she emphasized.

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