The fact that the Heart Institute’s capacity was swiftly put to full use after all can be put down to permanent encouragement and support from the citizens of West Berlin, the authorities and the health insurances, as well as the tremendous commitment of its initial staff. Some members of this "founding" staff still work at the Heart Institute today, and I am particularly grateful to them. After all, by the end of the first year, almost 800 heart operations had been performed; in 1987 the number rose to over 1,700 and in 1988 to 2,400. A lot of the patients came from Lower Saxony and Northrhine-Westphalia, where there were long waiting lists for heart surgery.

In April 1986, the first heart transplant operation was performed at the institute. By the end of that year this number had risen to 43, and very soon it became the largest programme of its kind in the whole of Europe, despite the fact that 90 % of the patients came to Berlin from West Germany.

It was especially the spectacular heart transplantations which had an impact no-one had counted on, especially as we matched ourselves largely against events in the USA, or other countries in the Western world. In the East half of the city, which the authorities there considered to be the "real" Berlin, taking pride in what they considered to be outstanding medical achievements, a close watch was kept on the developments at the Heart Institute. The East German government soberly registered that not only had the first heart transplantations been carried out in West Berlin but that they were obviously becoming a matter of routine there, and became worried. Indeed, as secret police documents later revealed, they responded with hectic activities, including plans for a similar heart centre in the "capital of the German Democratic Republic", subsequently thwarted, however, by political developments.

The Heart Institute acquired its real significance after German reunification, when East Germany’s borders were opened. In 1989, the number of heart operations performed at the five heart surgery clinics in the GDR was practically equal to the number being carried out at the GHI alone. Consequently, there was a sudden influx of patients from the former GDR, some of them with very advanced heart disease conditions. In the years that followed, this tendency increased due to the large number of heart catheterization laboratories that had been set up within a very short time in the new German states; these helped to diagnose a tremendous number of heart conditions, but the heart surgery clinics required to treat them properly had not yet been established. This meant that the GHI was the only clinic in East Germany which could intervene quickly, and the reaction of the health authorities and the health insurance funds in Berlin and Brandenburg was to request an extension of the institute’s capacity from 2,500 to 3,500 openheart operations as of 1996. In the meantime, a total of 54,000 operations of this kind have been performed at the institute.

continuation