Cape Town - Three Cape Town volunteers formed part of Operation Smile’s first-ever all-women surgical programme assisting 80 children born with cleft lips and deformed palates with surgeries in Malawi.
Operation Smile’s Women in Medicine surgical programme brought together 82 women from across 15 countries and 12 specialities for the surgical, education and research programmes beginning in Lilongwe last Friday and running until September17.
Eight South African specialist medical volunteers joined the first-in-Africa programme, including UCT’s head of Global Surgery, Professor Salome Maswime.
The Cape Town specialists include speech therapist Roslyn Lentin, cleft surgeon Dr Gertruida van Niekerk, and paediatrician Dr Hedwig van der Watt.
Operation Smile South Africa executive director Sarah Scarth said surgeries would be performed predominantly on babies under 24 months, a few older children, and a couple of adults at the Kamuzu Central Hospital until Friday.
“We estimate that globally a child is born with a cleft palate every three minutes. The estimated cleft palate prevalence in Malawi is 0.67/1 000 births.
However, there are only three plastic surgeons (two in public health and one in private) in the whole of Malawi. There is also a paucity of other specialities, such as anaesthetist physicians (only six in the whole country) and paediatricians,” Scarth said.
“Operation Smile is actively investing in education and training in order to strengthen the local health system. Currently, we need to bring in volunteers from other countries, like South Africa where the standard of our medical training is so high, to deliver these surgical programmes to address the enormous backlog.”
One in 10 babies born with a cleft palate will die due to malnourishment as the mother will struggle to feed the child, Scarth said.
Operation Smile volunteer and plastic surgeon in Malawi, Dr Wone Banda, said: “Medicine and surgery, in particular, is a field that has for a long time been dominated by males.
“I endeavour to contribute to change that. I want to be the reason more women join the field, as they’ll have someone to look up to as a role model and mentor.
“Female patients deserve to have adequate representation in the medical field to push for equitable distribution of care and resources.”