“They are doing tremendous lifesaving work! We were impressed by the tremendous vision and passion of the teams to continue to improve and expand to meet the needs of more patients.” Our board chair Heather Hudnut Page recently visited our partner hospitals in Vietnam and called her tour “eye-opening.”

We have two partner hospitals in Vietnam: one in Ho Chi Minh City and the other in Hanoi. To improve care for children with heart defects, we train in-country heart specialists to work as a multidisciplinary team.

The team at Nhi Dong 1 in Ho Chi Minh City is mentored by medical volunteers from Boston Children’s Hospital and is on track to become a Children’s HeartLink Center of Excellence. Last year the hospital performed over 400 heart surgeries and served 14,000 children. The team there is now working on early detection of congenital heart disease. Vietnam National Children’s Hospital in Hanoi has the largest heart program in the country, performing over 1,300 heart surgeries on children last year alone. Together with their mentoring team from the University of California San Francisco, they have developed a plan to serve even more children next year.

Read Heather’s earlier blog post here, which details her background in health care and the medical device industry.