Magdi Yacoub Foundation to inaugurate Cairo Heart Center in August

CAIRO - 18 January 2025: Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation reveals inauguration of Cairo Center, as an extension to the Aswan Heart Center, according to Dr. Magdi Ishak, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation. 

 

In statements to et, Dr. Ishak said that the Aswan Center has currently reached a very distinguished stage globally and is recognized worldwide. "If you go to the American Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons or the European Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons, they will praise the Aswan Heart Center," he added.

 

He further went on saying that the people are the ones who called the Aswan Center a center of excellence "due to the services it provides to the Egyptian patient."

 

He explained that the Cairo Center is an extension of the Magdi Yacoub Foundation in Aswan, but with a wider capacity. Before we started working on establishing this center, we conducted a comprehensive study on the needs required by the center and commissioned the McKinsey Foundation, which is one of the largest institutions, and we told them to come and work with us and tell us what we need in the Cairo Center. In the end, they came out with the same conclusion that we reached, which is that people need treatment for heart disease, which is the biggest cause of death worldwide.

 

Dr. Magdi Ishak, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation

 

 

Dr. Magdi Ishak explained that Aswan did not have the capacity to receive more cases, that's why it was important to establish the center in Cairo.

 

"When it is completed, it will be a distinctive architectural and scientific landmark in the history of all of Egypt," Dr. Ishak continued.

 

He went on explaining the place, saying it "dazzles you with its distinctive architectural design, because it was designed by one of the greatest designers in the world, whose name is "Lord Norman Robert Foster", the most famous British and world-famous architect."

 

Regarding the inauguration time, Dr. Ishak announced that the Cairo Center will be opened in August, so that outpatient clinics will be opened, followed by operations and catheters at the end of the year.

 

He stressed that this project is not a hospital, it is a building on an area of ​​100 thousand square meters, and provides 3 services: medical research, training and education, noting that it is a training center equipped in a way that the doctor works on the simulator or models as if he is performing a surgical operation with the simulator and artificial intelligence, "because we aim to train many people not only with us, but for them to work in other places in the world, because these people will be our ambassadors abroad when they say that they trained at Dr. Magdi Yacoub's center."

 

He said that research and training take up a very large part of the building, and the rest of the building can be called a heart hospital, and includes 300 beds, 148 of which are intensive care beds, because we only perform very complex heart surgeries, and therefore we find that we are focused on having a sufficient number of intensive care beds and the capacity is 3 times greater than the Aswan Foundation. 

 

He further added that Aswan Center performs 1,100 open heart cases per year, and about 3,500 catheterizations for adults and children, explaining that 40% of catheters are for children, and 60% of catheters are for adults.

 

He stressed that the capacity of the Cairo Center will be three times that of Aswan, and it can perform 3,000 complex open heart surgeries per year, and 123,000 catheterizations per year, in addition to the outpatient clinics, adding that the most important thing in this whole system is that you treat the patient for free and without him putting his hand in his pocket, and this principle is in Aswan and will be applied in the Cairo Center, although the treatment is very expensive, whether stents or others are very expensive and you buy them all in dollars or euros, and the patient is treated for free because the Egyptian people stand in solidarity and cooperate to donate for his treatment, we are nothing more than a means to facilitate the service between the donor and the needy.