Sometime next month, Dr. Moses deGraft-Johnson and a team of surgeons will perform open heart surgery at the Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital, the first such operation in the territory.
Valdemar Hill, hospital board chairman, broke the news at a special meeting of the board Friday. "This is a very exciting, trailblazing time for us," Hill said, "It is a milestone for sure."
Hired by the hospital earlier this month, deGraft-Johnson specializes in adult cardiac surgery and recently completed a five-year cardiothoracic fellowship at the University of Minnesota – Lillehei Heart Institute. He has been consulting with the V.I. Cardiac Center at the hospital for many months and recently arranged the donation of a full suite of state-of-the-art cardiac surgery equipment from Lillehei, Hill said. A team of specialists from the Lillehei Institute will be coming to assist deGraft-Johnson and the Juan Luis team with the procedure.
Hill credited deGraft-Johnson for making it happen. "It was really his initiative," Hill said.
DeGraft-Johnson is co-founder of Project Reach, a nonprofit charitable organization with expert volunteer heart surgeons and other medical providers responsible for providing health services in the South Saharan region of Africa. In that capacity, he has traveled frequently to Africa and performed numerous life-saving heart surgeries free of charge.
Along with his new job helping to grow cardiac care on St. Croix, he is heavily involved in a project to build an up-to-date hospital in Ghana, where he was born and raised until the age of nine.
The special meeting was called so the board could confer staff credentials upon deGraft-Johnson and the assisting physicians, authorizing them to practice medicine at the hospital. At the same time, the board approved staff credentials for several other new and returning doctors and nurses. Voting to approve the credentials were Hill, Imelda Dizon, Dr. Keri Biscoe, Deepak Bansal and Joyce Heyliger. Wallace Phaire voted nay. Kye Walker and Carmelo Rivera were absent.
The next regular meeting of the hospital board will be Jan. 20 at 5:30 p.m. in the hospital’s conference room.
