Accommodation near Groote Schuur Hospital - 5

Groote Schuur Hospital is one of the largest government-funded hospitals in the Western Cape. It is situated in Observatory, Cape Town, on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. It is a teaching hospital, closely affiliated with the University of Cape Town, one of the best universities in Africa, and is renowned for being the venue for the first ever human to human heart transplant.

Groote Schuur, which means ‘Great Barn’, is named after the farm on which it is situated - a settler farm established in Cape Town’s early days. The hospital opened its doors for the very first time in 1938 and grew steadily in the following years.

In 1967, Dr Christian Barnard performed ground breaking surgery when he successfully transplanted the heart of a woman (who had died in a tragic accident) into a man, whose own heart was failing due to his diabetes. This surgery changed medicine forever and many people are still benefitting every day from this medical advancement.

Due to growing demand, the hospital had undergone many extensions, and today the original hospital building stands in the centre and houses a various clinical departments as well as the ‘Heart of Cape Town Museum’.

After the hospital building extensions were complete, the original surgical theatres utilised in the heart transplant were preserved and today you can take a tour which gives a chronological explanation of the steps involved in the feat, starting with the reason that the female heart donor was brought to Groote Schuur in the first place.

The heart transplant aside, Groote Schuur is an internationally recognised teaching hospital known as an excellent research institution and boasting a particularly good reputation for its trauma unit, anaesthesiology department and internal medicine department.

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