A 45-year-old patient after surgery for a brain injury rests at District 2 Hospital. — Photo courtesy of District 2 Hospital |
HCM CITY — Several HCM City district-level hospitals now have the capacity to perform surgery on patients with serious brain injuries, helping to ease patient overload at the city’s central-level hospitals.
For patients with brain injuries, surgery is especially critical in the first four hours after the injury, as it helps to reduce the rate of mortality by 30 per cent, according to doctors at District 2 Hospital.
Surgery performed during this “golden period” also helps to minimise damage to brain tissue.
Last month, two patients with serious brain injuries, caused by traffic accidents, had operations and have since been discharged from the hospital.
The hospital’s doctors said the patients would have died if emergency surgery had not been performed to remove blood clots that had put pressure on the brain and had damaged brain tissue, causing bleeding.
Most of the brain injuries from traffic accidents are due to people not wearing a helmet or wearing a substandard one.
A survey conducted by the Health Strategy and Policy Institute under the Ministry of Health, released in 2013, showed that brain injuries were the second-leading cause of fatalities in Việt Nam, followed by heart disease. —VNS