This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The conjoined Bhutanese twins Nima and Dawa are expected to undergo life-changing separation surgery in Victoria after weeks of preparation.

Surgeons at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s hospital are confident the operation will go ahead on Friday, with the 15-month-old girls thought to be strong enough for the six-hour procedure.

The surgery has previously been postponed after last-minute checks revealed the sisters were not ready.

Play Video 1:33 Bhutanese conjoined twins to be separated at Melbourne hospital – video

The head of paediatric surgery, Dr Joe Crameri, is leading the operation which will involve 18 medical staff. Each girl will be designated a separate team to care for her in theatre, plus nursing and anaesthetic support teams.

The sisters, who were brought to Australia with their mother in October, are joined at the torso and share a liver. It is also possible they share a bowel.

The procedure and recovery are expected to cost at least $350,000 and the state government has offered to pay the bill.

Carmeri told the ABC on Friday morning that the teams were confident everything was in place to move forward with the surgery.

He said the girls were in hospital and the surgery was expected to start at 8 am.

“We have been in today to make sure that we can fit both girls in the same operating theatre when they are divided,” he said.

“That is all looking very positive.”

He said it was unlikely the teams would have the surgery completed by 4pm this afternoon.

“The reality is until the operation starts and ultimately we get to see what is connecting the girls, we won’t really know how long,” he said.

He said the challenges of the surgery would depend on where the girls were connected.

He was confident the team they had built could manage their shared liver safely.

“I think the unknown is the fact that it can be the girls share the bowel,” he said.

Flights to Australia and other costs have been funded by the Children First Foundation, an Australian-based charity that focuses on ensuring children from developing countries have access to specialist surgeries and medical care.

The charity previously partnered with the hospital to fund the surgery that separated the Bangladeshi conjoined twins Trishna and Krishna in 2009. The orphaned twins were joined at the head and shared blood vessels and brain tissue. They now live in Melbourne with their adopted family.

The landlocked Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is financially poor and has rejected gross domestic product as a measure of progress in favour of a gross national happiness index.

The charity’s chief executive, Elizabeth Lodge, said the twins had recently dropped a lot of weight and their mother was keen to see them separated.

“Mum said the girls are getting a little bit frustrated with each other, as you would at 14 months, and, like any siblings they’re getting cranky, so mum is really looking forward to the operation happening sooner rather than later,” she told reporter last week.