Leading article: To form human resources.

To form human resources in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery was the topic of the symposium which we held in Accra in February 2006. It is about a capital need to the development of the Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery African, in the center of our concerns.

It is thus normal that the topic of the next symposium in Dakar in February of the next year is still entitled: Development of human resources and equipment. These two objectives are indeed the double challenge that the members of the African Association of the Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons fixed themselves.

We must indeed ensure the reinforcement of our teams, as well as the changing by the installation of and center training schemes of accreditation of quality for the theoretical and practical framing of the young surgeons and other members of the surgical team.

To answer the recommendations of the last general assembly of Association, work of the next symposium will be published in Annals, for a broad diffusion at all the African medical community.

While waiting, the synopsis of this second delivery is articulated around the scientific productions of our centers of Dakar and Accra.

In the first, it arises that the surgery of the congenital cardiopathies gives favorable results. However, an improvement of the human and technical means is necessary, so that all malformations, including the complex cardiopathies, can profit from a complete surgical cure.

In the second, the study of readmissions patients in service of intensive care after cardiac and thoracic surgery, shows that they are associated a raised mortality, itself dependent in majority on a heart failure. Here still, the improvement of the assumption of responsibility and consequently that of the results in term of morbidity and mortality, will be done only in the context of surgical teams of quality and having an adequate technical plate.

These two operations, but also the other reports of research which make this synopsis, emphasize in a particular way the need for working with the optimal equipment of our centers of accreditation, and with that to form human resources in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.


François ONDO NDONG