Published August 14, 2024
Dr. Grace Arteaga vividly recalls a harrowing experience from the first day of a 2024 Children’s HeartLink training visit to Coimbatore, India. A young child had gone into cardiac arrest, and the intensive care unit (ICU) was filled with urgency. Despite her extensive experience at Mayo Clinic as a pediatric critical care specialist, she had never performed ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) life support in such an unfamiliar setting. She watched in awe as the heart care team she was working with at G. Kuppuswamy Naidu Memorial (GKNM) Hospital worked with remarkable skill and precision. Against all odds, the child survived — a testament to the team’s expertise and a powerful reminder for Dr. Arteaga of the incredible impact skilled teamwork can have.
In moments like these, Dr. Arteaga’s time and knowledge are lifesaving. Her dedication as a Children’s HeartLink volunteer, training heart care teams in low-resource environments to provide sustainable, high-quality care for children with congenital heart disease (CHD), makes her an exemplary figure in pediatric cardiac care.
We are proud to recognize Dr. Grace Arteaga, pediatric critical care specialist at Mayo Clinic, as the recipient of the 2024 Children’s HeartLink Founders Award. She will be recognized at the Children’s HeartLink Global Gathering on Friday, October. 25, 2024.
“This award recognizes a leader committed to the Children’s HeartLink mission for their extraordinary humanitarian volunteerism, compassion and commitment to save the lives of children with heart disease,” said Jackie Boucher, president of Children’s HeartLink. “Dr. Arteaga exudes all these qualities and more in all that she does. She has shared her time and talents with so many clinicians over the years, improving the lives of children and families affected by CHD in Brazil and India, in addition to the U.S.”
Compassion and expertise in the ICU propel training and mentorship in Brazil
Dr. Arteaga is a pediatric intensivist who cares for children while they’re recovering from heart surgery in the ICU, often providing reassurance to families through difficult days. Her compassion and empathy for the children and families she works with are hard to miss; they’re palpable.
Since 2011, Dr. Arteaga has applied her expertise to train pediatric heart care teams as a Children’s HeartLink volunteer. Her first assignment was with the heart care team at Hospital da Criança e Maternidade (HCM) in São José do Rio Preto, Brazil, which became a Children’s HeartLink Center of Excellence in 2021. The hospital serves a multi-state region of 80 million people in southeast Brazil.
Dr. Arteaga’s leadership and expertise were vital contributors to the success of the HCM partnership with medical volunteers from Mayo Clinic and Children’s Minnesota. Working alongside the heart care team at HCM, these teams significantly improved clinical care, reduced infections following operations and lowered the mortality rate in complex CHD procedures.
“Our team is proud to have the opportunity to learn about medicine and more, about human behavior, with Dr. Arteaga,” said Dr. Ulisses Croti, head of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery Service at HCM. “With her leadership, our team learned more about the integral role we all can play in a child’s recovery after surgery by bringing empathy and compassion into the intensive care unit. We were blessed by universal conspiracy to meet Dr. Arteaga in our way!”
Dr. Arteaga used her expertise to support the clinicians at HCM on their journey to becoming a Children’s HeartLink Center of Excellence. While remaining humble about her own contributions, she isn’t shy about emphasizing the importance of dedicated people doing the best they can and going the extra mile.
“It takes a worldwide effort to get something like that done. HCM had the drive to improve. And when you have that internally, it’s a lot easier to support,” Dr. Arteaga said.
She remembers being surprised at the beginning of the HCM partnership that the pediatricians in the ICU had not been trained in critical care. Through the partnership, and following Dr. Croti’s suggestion, they began sending people for training to other countries.
“When you start putting the pieces together, and you have people like Dr. Croti and nurse Bruna Cury, who are so open to direction, it’s a domino effect,” Dr. Arteaga said. “You influence one person, and that person can influence two people, and those two people are going to take the message further, and as long as the effort and the mission and the vision are the same, miracles happen.”
Dr. Arteaga credits Dr. Croti, who had the ambition to improve the hospital, and nurse Cury, who translated between Portuguese and English and had trained in the United States and Canada, for their contributions to the success of the partnership.
“Dr. Arteaga has been such a huge blessing to our team,” said Cury, “providing us support weekly with case discussions in which we learn so much every time! Also, an exceptional human being, fully committed professionally and with a huge heart and soul.”
Crucial recommendations improve heart care for children in India
While her relationship continues with HCM, she also began working with GKNM Hospital in Coimbatore, India in 2016, when she was part of the hospital’s initial Children’s HeartLink assessment visit.
Dr. Arteaga’s recommendations throughout the years helped GKNM Hospital implement multiple vital ICU protocols, and her advocacy efforts convinced the hospital administration about the need to appoint a dedicated pediatric cardiac intensivist.
“Her passion for patient care, her keenness to work hand-in-hand with the partners and help them understand the nuances of patient care, her appreciation and respect for the partners and the care they deliver in resource-constrained settings have earned her admiration and regard from her colleagues, partners and the Children’s HeartLink team,” said Children’s HeartLink’s Country Director for India, Veera Rajasekhar.
Through Children’s HeartLink partnerships, doctors, nurses and healthcare teams volunteer to share their expertise and knowledge, aiding local teams in building the best pediatric cardiac care programs possible in their settings. They do not do the work for the local teams; instead, two dedicated teams come together to learn from one another.
Regardless of jetlag, Dr. Arteaga is known to remain by the bedside teaching nurses, intensivists and the ICU team, ensuring they are equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to provide exceptional care to children.
Her commitment goes beyond medical care, often providing – and teaching others to extend – emotional support to families.
“She’ll skip a couple of her meals to stay next to the patients,” said Dr. Vijayakumar Raju, chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at GKNM Hospital. “She goes and supports the family, especially when the family needs comfort. Not many intensivists go talk to the family, but she does. It’s the human component that Dr. Arteaga brings to care that we learn from.”
Those who have worked with her recognize how she selflessly extends herself to every component of the healthcare team, providing support and guidance wherever needed.
“She is adaptable. She tries to set goals that are attainable and tries to get you there,” said Jody Doll, nurse practitioner at Mayo Clinic who has volunteered with Dr. Arteaga in Brazil and India. “She’s forever a committed person to what she sets her mind to. She’s a treat to work with and her energy is always positive.”
See inside a training visit attended by Dr. Arteaga at GKNM Hospital.
A lifelong dedication to medicine and commitment to mentorship for sustaining long-term partnerships
Born in the United States, Dr. Arteaga knew from childhood that she wanted to be a doctor. She became a physician in Mexico, where she saw poverty and medical need firsthand. Recognizing the immense privilege she’d been given, she learned to be a flexible contributor to medicine and felt a deep desire to give back.
“My heart is in the heart,” Dr. Arteaga said. “I wanted to do some kind of service because I feel I’ve been given so much. I needed to give back. I was very interested in critical care of children with congenital heart disease, so volunteering for Children’s HeartLink was a no-brainer.”
When she was invited by previous Children’s HeartLink Founders Award winner Dr. Joseph Dearani, cardiac surgery chair at Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Roxann Pike, anesthesiologist at Mayo Clinic, to volunteer for Children’s HeartLink, she did not hesitate.
“She’s exceedingly competent and very compassionate. And this is a specialty where competence and empathy are essential. She instills confidence and knows how to smooth everything out during challenging situations to put everybody at ease and provide reassurance,” said Dr. Dearani.
Dr. Dearani was also the person who nominated Dr. Arteaga for the 2024 Children’s HeartLink Founders Award.
“As a surgeon, you don’t have to worry what’s going on at the bedside when she’s involved; she’ll always do the right thing,” he said. “She’s also a wonderful teacher. She’s been totally devoted to Children’s HeartLink and the partnerships she commits to, whether it’s Zoom calls, phone calls, or trips to HeartLink programs… she’s totally committed.”
Throughout her training to become a physician and her career, she credits mentors with playing a significant role in her development, and these relationships remain strong. Now as a mentor herself, she plays a crucial role in the lives of clinicians. She believes mentorships should intellectually challenge both the mentor and the mentee and stresses the importance of human connections.
Three lessons learned from volunteering with Children’s HeartLink
Children’s HeartLink partnerships are true peer-to-peer relationships where both medical volunteers and partner hospitals benefit. Dr. Arteaga learns lessons both small and large from every interaction.
During an early visit to HCM in Brazil, she discovered they didn’t have bronchoscopes to clear mucus from patients’ airways. Faced with a child needing to be extubated, she was concerned about the excess mucus. Their heart care team demonstrated how they perform physiotherapy in Brazil to manage this issue.
“I was so impressed by how well they do it and the outcomes of the patients, that I brought that to my practice,” Dr. Arteaga said. “And I started teaching back home that if we don’t have a bronchoscope, this is how we do it.”
Her volunteer work has also helped Dr. Arteaga realize how important lifesaving heart care is in the lives of children with CHD and their families around the world.
“The love a mother has for her child is the same everywhere. You can go to the best hospital in the United States and you see that love. And then you go to a place with no resources, and love is exactly the same,” Dr. Arteaga said.
Dr. Arteaga is dedicated to bringing high-quality medical care to low-resource settings. She envisions a continuum of care where dedicated professionals work together to provide communal medical care without borders. She wishes for everyone, everywhere, to receive the same quality of medical care, driven by a collective commitment to the well-being of every child.
This brings a third lesson she’s learned in her time volunteering with Children’s HeartLink, that the work of transforming pediatric heart care worldwide does not happen without a community effort.
“My role is just a minor part of this whole idea of making a better world. To make things better we need the support of every donor, the medical volunteers, the staff, the hospital partners, every person who is sitting in the room at the Global Gathering in October. They all come together to make a better world for children with CHD. Without supporters, the work that we do to make things better would not be possible,” Dr. Arteaga said.