JAKARTA: A 22-member medical team from Saudi Arabia has been in Indonesia since the beginning of May to train doctors in advanced cardiac procedures on adults and children.

Facilitated by the Kingdom’s aid agency KSrelief, the cardiovascular surgical team is embedded with Adam Malik Central General Hospital in Medan, North Sumatra province.

It consists of surgeons, specialist nurses, perfusionists and respiratory therapists from the King Faisal Cardiac Center in Jeddah and the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center in Riyadh.

Among them are “some of the best heart surgeons in Saudi Arabia,” who not only “help save the lives of Indonesian people, but also provide training to young doctors to handle open-heart surgery, catheterization and pediatric heart surgery,” Indonesia’s Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said in a statement on Monday.

“(Their presence) will encourage quality improvement and accelerate the transfer of knowledge to young Indonesian doctors. They will train and work with well-known doctors from abroad, learning their work discipline, work culture and interaction with patients.”

During their stay in Indonesia, the Saudi Arabia doctors will perform surgery on about 30 patients, with all the costs covered by the program.

Heart disease is the second-leading cause of death in the Southeast Asian nation — after stroke — killing 250,000 people a year, including 6,000 children.

Many patients die before they receive specialist care, which is often available only at hospitals in the biggest cities.

The transfer-knowledge program sponsored by KSrelief supports Indonesia’s health system transformation plan, under which all regional government hospitals will be expected to carry out open-heart surgery and pediatric heart surgery, without having to refer patients to the main cardiac centers in Jakarta.

The Ministry of Health said some of the complex procedures introduced by the Saudi Arabia team at the Medan hospital, including the replacement of a part of the aorta and the aortic valve of the heart, have never been performed in the province.

The ministry quoted the Medan hospital’s head of cardiovascular services, Dr. Faisal Habib, who said his team was also learning from the Saudi Arabia doctors the advanced techniques of handling surgery in less invasive ways.

“One of their master skills is performing heart surgery without opening the entire chest, but only through a small opening,” he said. “We are learning this from their expertise.”