Free heart hospital for children in Fiji inaugurated

In 1932, a teenager from Saurashtra, Kanji Tappoo, boarded a ship bound for Fiji, the furthest outpost of the British Empire, to join his father who had gone there as a labourer. Tappoo eventually built a business empire in the island nation with his hard work and integrity. Six years ago, his son Mahendra Tappoo and grandson Sumeet Tappoo, who is a musician, embarked on a voyage of another kind, a spiritual one.

They founded the largest NGO in Fiji, the Sai Prema Foundation, with support from their government and fellow citizens. On April 27, the Prime Minister of Fiji, Josaia Voreque Bainimarama, and Sadguru Madhusudan Sai of India, the catalyst behind the project, jointly inaugurated the Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Children’s Hospital, Fiji, which the foundation has built in the capital city of Suva. Notably it is the only totally free child heart care hospital in the Pacific Isles—something which even wealthy nations in region, like Australia and New Zealand, have not been able to do.

Mahendra and Sumeet were inspired by the spiritual master Sri Sathya Sai Baba and his enlightened devotee Sadguru Madhusudan Sai, who is based in Muddenahalli in Karnataka. The foundation has been feeding the poor, offering free health care on wheels in 6,500 villages and collecting blood for general surgeries. With the support of community churches of New Zealand, it has also been in the forefront of Covid relief and disaster relief in cyclone-prone Fiji. Care of the orphaned, the aged and the differently abled has been a constant focus. The foundation has won praise from the UNDP and WHO for knitting together all sections of Fijian society; in particular the youth, through provision of free health care and lifestyle initiatives for university students, sports bodies, police and fire service personnel and even the armed forces.

But Fiji needed more from the foundation, as every year more than 2,500 children are born in the Pacific Isles with congenital heart disease. With timely surgery, these children can live a full normal life, but they succumb to the illness for lack of child heart care facilities in the region. The cost of treatment in Australia and New Zealand is prohibitive. When Sadguru Madhusudan Sai communicated the soulful wish that the foundation start a Sri Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Child Heart Care hospital in Fiji to address this problem, in simple faith the Tappoos jumped in. The foundation had already worked with the Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospital chain, which was started in India in 2012. The only dedicated, totally free child heart care hospital chain in the world, which has done 19,000 heart repair procedures since inception, Sanjeevani sent teams to Fiji from 2016 onwards and surgically mended 73 little hearts. As Dr Krupali Tappoo, the medical director of the new Fiji hospital, revealed, that translated as over seven million dollars saved. But the cost of lives saved? Priceless!

The surgeries were followed by the inauguration of a free medical centre in Fiji in 2018, and the training in India of Fijian doctors and nurses in child heart care. By 2019 a cardiac screening centre opened in Fiji, and with the government of Fiji donating the land, construction of a dream children’s hospital with child heart care facilities, costing $25 million, began.

Covid-19 delayed the hospital by two years. Despite travel restrictions, however, desperate parents came with ailing children. The gravity of the situation was underlined when screening statistics showed that 500 of them needed urgent heart surgery to survive. In a do-or-die mission, a global team of individuals like long-time Sai Baba devotee Bob Bozzani of the USA and organisations like Sai Global Federation of Foundations, Rotary International and biomedical giants such as HD-Medical of USA (the brainchild of Arvind Thiagarajan, who made the first intelligent stethoscope) stepped in with timely funding, equipment and cutting edge knowhow. Together with support from the Fijian government, pandemic and natural disasters galore notwithstanding, the young and fearless foundation achieved the impossible.

The 21,000-square-foot hospital—the biggest project by any NGO in the history of Fiji—was inaugurated on April 27, incidentally the birthday of Prime Minister Bainimarama, in the presence of top diplomats from several countries including India. It was an eloquent ceremony, with traditional Fijian warmth and music. In a virtual inaugural message, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the fact that it was first ever totally free of cost, state-of-the-art facility for the children of the Pacific Isles, initiated by the Indian diaspora and facilitated by global participation, illustrated the ancient Indian adage ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ (the world is one family).

Delighted that Fiji should host the first such hospital in the entire South Pacific region, Prime Minister Bainimarama stated in his inaugural address that his government readily decided to support the Sai Prema Foundation of Fiji when it came up with a proposal to set up the first ever child heart care hospital of the South Pacific sans billing section; for he believed in the young idealistic Fijians of the foundation who dared to dream of saving the lives of hundreds of children of the Pacific Isles who could not access or afford life saving heart surgery.

A 21-member volunteering international surgery team headed by Dr Shaun Setty of USA, a globally renowned specialist in surgery for congenital heart disease, along with paediatric specialists in various domains from Stanford and Denver in the USA, Queensland in Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Oman and India, will begin work on April 30. At least 30 paediatric cardiac surgeries are to happen right away.

The aesthetically designed hospital has 27 dedicated paediatric cardiac beds and an equal number of general beds. American biomedical engineer Roy Morris who has equipped operating theatres in 42 countries, stated that the Fiji hospital is one of the very few in the world that has an operating room with all the equipment needed for the myriad kinds of surgeries that paediatric cardiac problems necessitate. Further, the cath lab and intensive care unit sport state-of-the-art technology.

According to C. Sreenivas, chairman of the Sri Sathya Sai Health and Education Trust, the vision is to build local capacity, making the facility in Fiji a centre of excellence in the South Pacific that offers all services totally free of cost to all beneficiaries. Sadguru Madhusudan Sai observed that the Fiji hospital marked the beginning of the international chapter of the Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Child Heart hospitals begun in India. With its unmatched experience in paediatric cardiac care, the Indian Sathya Sai Sanjeevani hospitals will train Fijian doctors, nurses, paramedics and support staff for free, guided by the motto, ‘Love All, Serve All. The Week