Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City completes first complex scoliosis surgery

Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City completes first complex scoliosis surgery

ABU DHABI- Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City (SSMC), a joint-venture partnership between Mayo Clinic and (SEHA), has completed the hospital’s first complex thoracolumbar scoliosis deformity correction on a 16-year-old female patient, Hoor Abu Baker Youssef Elnayed. Scoliosis surgery is typically performed at much larger centres due to its extremely complex nature. SSMC is the first health care centre in Abu Dhabi island to conduct the complex surgery, making it one of only three facilities in the UAE performing the procedure. The surgery was led by Dr. Charbel Daoud Moussallem, a veteran orthopedics and spine surgeon at SSMC with extensive experience in the region and in the U.S., having completed a Spine Surgery Fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He was assisted by SSMC Orthopedics Specialist Dr. Mahmoud Al Cheikh Ahmad. The Orthopedics team performed the procedure at SSMC in only three hours, achieving anatomical correction using neuromonitoring with minimal blood loss. "The team had undergone an extensive two-week period of pre-operative planning which – after conducting a mock surgery and doing consultations with a multidisciplinary team – we had factored in three hours of surgical time. Decreasing surgical time meant that the patient was healthy; it also means less blood loss