Heart surgeon 'pushed into emigrating’

Press, 27 December 1986, Page 12

Heart surgeon 'pushed into emigrating’

PA Wellington Wellington heart surgeon, Mr Allan Hilless, says the recommendation to set up New Zealand’s first heart transplant programme in Auckland will probably push him into emigrating. Mr Hilless, the surgeon at the centre of controversy over secret plans to perform the first transplant in New Zealand at Wellington Hospital in early October, said he saw the Auckland recommen-

dation as a political and personal decision against him. It was neither a logical nor cost effective recommendation when Wellington Hospital already had the staff, special facilities and was a central location, he said. Career-wise it was now better for him to seek work at an overseas transplant unit, and negotiations were already under way, he said. Mr Hilless would not name the unit.

He said he was concerned to learn that the cardiac surgical services review committee had indicated that a special isolation room for immediate post-operative care of transplant recipients would not need to be built at Auckland’s Green Lane Hospital for transplants to proceed. Wellington and Dunedin hospitals already had the facility which is used to protect recipients from infection for at least a week after the operation.

Mr Hilless reiterated comments he has made previously that he would not be prepared to perform a heart transplant without an isolation room.

His colleague at the centre of October’s forbidden transplant, the Wellington cardiologist, Dr Richard Thompson, also said an isolation room was considered absolutely vital to a transplant programme. However, the eminent heart surgeon, Sir Brian Barrett-Boyes, of Auckland, said he understood most units in the United

States were no longer using an isolation room because it was not now considered necessary. "Many units now in the United States are not using that and their results seem to be perfectly satisfactory,” he said. Heart recipients would be cared for in normal intensive care units along with other patients.

Sir Brian said he would be leaving transplants to the younger surgeons, and the most likely to perform the first transplant in New Zealand were Green Lane heart surgeons, Messrs David Hill and Clive Robinson. Sir Brian said he believed Auckland was the appropriate place for a transplant programme because its population would provide a donor pool. “If you have it anywhere else the expense of donor transport is going to be a very expensive cost,” he said.

“You would have to have a very good reason not to have it in Auckland.”