Tasmania’s major public hospital believes it has set a record for successful open heart surgery.
The Royal Hobart Hospital has performed 1,000 coronary artery bypass surgeries since 2008 without adverse effect.
The director of cardiothoracic surgery, Mark Murton, said the hospital had researched whether others had achieved the feat, but found nothing similar.
“Obviously we’ve done the literature research like anybody else, and got on Google, and we haven’t found any other reference to any other cardiac surgical procedure that’s been performed with such a safety record,” he said.
Tasmania’s high rates of obesity and smoking contribute to the state recording a higher than average rate of coronary artery disease.
Mr Murton said the hospital performed about 300 open heart surgery procedures a year, of which about two thirds were coronary artery grafts.
The procedure can be complex, taking up to 12 hours.
“The standard mortality even in the best units in the world is between 1 and 2 per cent, so to get to 1,000 without any is pretty significant,” he said.
Tasmania’s Health Minister Michael Ferguson was on hand to congratulate Mr Murton’s team.
“This is the health system that we aspire to, we want all of our services to reach these world class standards,” he said.
Mr Murton joked that he hoped the record would not lead to a flood of new patients.
“We’re not really advertising for extra work, let me tell you that,” he said.
Mr Murton’s unit has performed 9,000 heart operations since it opened in 1991.