Discharge received today the 23-year-old patient Eleni Hailamaki, who a few days ago successfully underwent a living donor liver transplant, her 50-year-old father.

This operation was performed for the first time in Greece by the team of Professor of Surgery Georgios Sotiropoulos, with the participation of German Professor Dieter Broering.

At the “People’s” Hospital Minister of Health Adonis Georgiadis, Deputy Minister of Health Irini Agapidaki and Deputy Minister of Health Marios Themistokleous were present today. Present were the Governor of the Hospital Theofanis Roidis, the Director of the Surgical Department of the Hospital Professor Nikolaos Nikiteas, the Professor of Surgery and Transplantation Giorgos Sotiropoulos, who performed the liver transplant, as well as the parents of the 23-year-old patient.

During his visit to the Hospital, the Minister of Health Mr. Adonis Georgiadis said: “We are very proud that the National Health System can carry out such specialized and difficult transplant operations. We are particularly proud of our “People’s” hospital, an excellent university clinic. We thank the University of Athens, to which the People’s Hospital belongs, and especially Professor Mr. Sotiropoulos, who gave hope to many patients that they can escape from such a serious disease.

In Eleni’s face we see hope for many other people and we are here, as we helped to solve problems for this operation to be done, to solve problems for many such operations to be done and to save many more people.”

He also referred to Eleni’s family, saying “we made them proud, not only Eleni, whom we all wish in passing and be iron and strong, but also her parents, who are a model of family and love between them.”

For his part, Professor of Surgery and Transplantation Mr. George Sotiropoulos stated:

“We are very happy that this process has been completed successfully. First of all, I would like to thank Eleni and her parents for trusting us in this process, because when you start a surgery that you do for the first time, especially in your country, which is not an easy country, Greece, we understand that the other person has to trust for it. I would like to thank the entire medical and nursing team because they supported us and, as you know, the operation was carried out on a holiday, many people interrupted their holidays or did not take holiday holidays in order to participate”.

Referring to the visit of Professor Dieter Broering, Mr. Sotiropoulos said: “We also invited a doctor from abroad because always when such a procedure starts, an experienced team comes to support it. It’s not just the technical part, you have to offer the best conditions at that moment to the patient. The easy thing would be to send the patient abroad. But with this we would only see the bush, we would not see the forest. So we wanted to turn this into action in our country.”

According to Mr. Sotiropoulos, “the operation is very specialized even in Germany, where I was for many years”, he said characteristically. He even added that out of the 21 transplant centers, only 4 carry out a live donor liver transplant and only 2 in adults, such as Eleni. Now what we’ve done is that the liver, which is a large intra-abdominal organ and we understand it as a single organ, there is a way to split it in half, to split it into two pieces, a right and a left. And in this way we took the father’s liver, which we saw was the most suitable, we divided it in two, we took the right lobe, that is, the right liver, and we implanted it in Helen after removing her own liver. So the father stayed with the left piece and the daughter has taken the right.”