IKEM has been completed 16 years since the laying of the foundation stone

PRAGUE - After sixteen years since the laying of the foundation stone for the new building of the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM), both patients and staff will see the commissioning of the entire new complex. President Václav Klaus is invited to today's grand opening of the Cardiac Center, which had previously operated in old facilities within the complex of Thomayer Hospital.
The construction of the Cardiac Center cost nearly 900 million crowns, lasting from December 2001 to September of this year. The former Minister of Health Jozef Kubinyi justified the dismissal of director Karel Filip in May 2004 by the extensions and rising costs of the construction. Professor Rudolf Poledne is now at the helm of IKEM.
The bed block of the Cardiac Center consists of a seven-story building, while the treatment block with operating rooms is housed in a five-story building, which completed the operating block already constructed in the first phase.
IKEM, as a leading Czech medical and research institution, currently has 330 beds and approximately 1,400 employees.
It was established in 1971 by merging several institutes. One of them was the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Surgery, where a pacemaker was first implanted in Czechoslovakia in 1962. In 1966, they performed the first kidney transplant here, in 1984 began the heart transplant program, and in 1995, the liver transplant program. IKEM performs three-quarters of heart transplants in the Czech Republic.