23,000 operations per year – every year the St Petersburg University Clinic helps more and more patients
Specialists of the Pirogov Clinic of High Medical Technologies at St Petersburg University have already performed about 23,000 operations so far this year. This is about 15% more than in 2018.
‘The doctors of the Clinic are doing everything possible to provide high-quality medical care to as many people as possible – both from St Petersburg and from other regions of Russia,’ noted Yury Fedotov, Director of the Clinic, Senior Vice-Rector for Medical Care at St Petersburg University and an Honoured Physician of the Russian Federation. ‘We organise our work in such a way that after the operation a person would return to their normal life as quickly as possible, already healthy and full of energy. At present, the average length of hospital stay is only 3.9 days and continues to decline.’
~26,000
people received treatment in 2019 in the Pirogov Clinic of High Medical Technologies at St Petersburg University. A year earlier, this figure was 21,500 patients.
The Pirogov Clinic of High Medical Technologies is a leading multi-field medical, scientific and educational institution in Russia. It is focused on performing operations of varying complexity: from surgical traumatology to cardiac surgery. In January 2018, the Clinic became part of St Petersburg University. Raul Gainetdinov, Director of the Institute of Translational Biomedicine at St Petersburg University, an expert in the field of experimental pharmacology of brain diseases and a world-famous scientist, was appointed its academic supervisor.
During these two years, doctors of the medical institution have achieved success in a variety of areas. For example, in 2019, endocrine surgeons performed here more than 6,000 endocrine surgeries, of which almost half were for thyroid cancer. No other medical institution in the world performs such a number of operations. Records are also beaten by cardiac surgeons: experts of the Centre for Cardiac Surgery and Interventional Cardiology of the Clinic have performed more than 700 successful open-heart surgeries this year (40% more than a year earlier). This increase in the operation volume has become the greatest among all cardiology centres in the Russian Federation. Outstanding successes have also been achieved by the oncological service of the Clinic. In 2019, more than 1,000 operations were performed for malignant tumours of the stomach, intestines, liver, breast, kidney, prostate and other body sites. More than 1,300 patients received modern chemotherapy and immunotherapy. These figures are more than three times higher than last year.
The key priority in the Clinic's activity is scientific research. Thanks to the resources of the University, this work has now reached a new level. This autumn, the staff of the Endocrine Surgery Department, together with physicists from the Resource Centre for Optical and Laser Materials Research at the St Petersburg University Research Park, have presented a device prototype that makes it possible to distinguish using laser between fluorescence from the thyroid and parathyroid glands during surgery. This unique device has already been tested in operating rooms: it improves the quality of endocrine surgeries and reduces the number of post-surgery complications.
Additionally, last year the Clinic acquired five 3D printers that make prostheses from titanium and plastic. The laboratory of computer modelling technology and 3D printing was equipped with the help of St Petersburg University. It lets the Clinic staff create patient-specific fixators. Such appliances help to carry out effective preoperative assessment and minimise the human factor during surgery.
Another important achievement is that the Pirogov Clinic of St Petersburg University has been listed among the best medical institutions in St Petersburg. It became the best in five nominations at once in the ranking published on the website ‘NaPopravku.ru’: Traumatology and Orthopaedics; Gynaecology; Urology; Endocrinology; and Reproductology. According to the creators of the service, the ranking is based on verified reviews of the patients who have been treated in one or another St Petersburg clinic.