The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) has re­ceived a do­na­tion of US$120,000 from one of its first med­ical grad­u­ates.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, UWI said that the months of Au­gust and Sep­tem­ber marked its an­nu­al Glob­al Giv­ing cam­paign and as the 2021 edi­tion of the crowd­fund­ing cam­paign drew to a close, it re­ceived the gen­er­ous gift from alum­nus and Car­dio­tho­racic Sur­geon Dr Michael Woo-Ming.

“A mem­ber of the first class of med­ical stu­dents en­rolled in 1948 (at what was then the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of the West In­dies) Dr Woo-Ming went on to be­come the first Pro­fes­sor and Chief of Car­dio­tho­racic Surgery at The UWI, Mona Cam­pus. Dur­ing his train­ing years, he was him­self the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of phil­an­thropic fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance,” the UWI state­ment said.

It added that to­day, the mem­ber of the 1948 med­ical class had be­come the bene­fac­tor of an en­dow­ment fund that will stim­u­late re­search in Car­dio­tho­racic Surgery in Ja­maica.

Af­ter grad­u­at­ing in 1954 with his MBBS de­gree, Dr Woo-Ming spent four more years at the Mona Cam­pus, ro­tat­ing through dif­fer­ent spe­cial­i­ties which helped his de­ci­sion to be­come a sur­geon. He need­ed fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance to fur­ther his stud­ies in the UK and a Lev­er­hulme Fel­low­ship en­abled him to stay for four ad­di­tion­al years in Lon­don to be trained in the new­ly-de­vel­op­ing pro­ce­dure of open heart surgery be­fore re­turn­ing to Mona.

“Then be­gan the chal­leng­ing task of fi­nanc­ing this very ex­pen­sive, com­plex sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure and train­ing a large team of doc­tors, nurs­es and tech­ni­cians to save the life of the first open heart surgery pa­tient. With com­mit­ted team ef­fort and an­nu­al do­na­tions arranged by or­gan­i­sa­tions such as the Li­ons Club and the Heart Foun­da­tion, Dr Woo-Ming and his team would go on to pro­vide world-class open heart sur­gi­cal ser­vices to Ja­maica for a decade from 1967 to 1977 af­ter which he mi­grat­ed from Ja­maica for the Unit­ed States,” UWI not­ed.

Dr Woo-Ming said, “The en­tire pe­ri­od from 1948 to 1977, in­clud­ing my stud­ies at The UWI and pi­o­neer­ing open heart surgery at Mona is an in­deli­ble part my life’s his­to­ry. This en­dow­ment fund to stim­u­late re­search ac­tiv­i­ty in Car­dio­tho­racic Surgery is one way of memo­ri­al­is­ing my ex­pe­ri­ence and con­tribut­ing to the con­tin­ued im­prove­ment of the open heart sur­gi­cal ser­vices of­fered to the peo­ple of Ja­maica and the rest of the world.”