Groote Schuur’s roll of landmark ops

GROOTE Schuur Hospital has managed to maintain high standards of service, teaching and research, in spite of budgetary and other constraints. The hospital’s trained medical, nursing and allied health personnel are still held in high regard and are sought after all over the world.

The hospital, together with the Health Sciences Faculty of the University of Cape Town, has claimed many firsts over the years:

In 1965 the country’s first interuterine blood transfusion for Rhesus disease was administered.

Research in tissue matching and work by clinical cardiologists under Professor Vel Schrire helped make the first organ transplants possible, including the first heart transplant by Professor Chris Barnard’s team in 1967, and the first renal transplants in Cape Town during the same year.

The department of surgery carried out the world’s first cross-circulation between baboon and man in 1968.

Another world first was the development and first use of the University of Cape Town U-tube (1968 to 1973) in providing prolonged palliation in the treatment of high bile duct carcinoma. This became a commonly-used form of treatment until hepatic resection techniques improved and curative surgery took over from this palliative surgery.

In 1974 a fallopian tube transplant took place for the first time in the world.

In 1974 the hospital performed South Africa’s first bone marrow transplant.

In the early 1980s, the first sperm bank in South Africa (and still the only sperm bank in the country which supplies sperm to all ethnic groups) was established.

From 2001 onwards, the department of neurosurgery introduced endovascular surgery to treat brain aneurysms as an alternative to conventional brain surgery.

A Groote Schuur Hospital surgical team was the first in the world to transplant a kidney from an HIV-positive donor to an HIV-positive recipient.

In 2011 a team from the ENT department performed ground-breaking surgery when they implanted bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHA) directly into the skulls of two young patients.