peterRobin Muchetu, Senior Reporter
LOCAL doctors have benefited from free maxillofacial surgery training from visiting Operation of Hope Worldwide surgeons that have been at Mpilo Central Hospital in Bulawayo for the past month.
The surgeons were offering free surgery to children with cleft lip, pallet and other defects to the face.
Chief executive officer and president of Operation of Hope Worldwide Mrs Jennifer Trubenbach said they had managed to restore smiles to more than 130 children after having spent three years locked up due to Covid-19 restrictions that affected their travelling.
The surgeons said they were offering maxillofacial surgery training for locals in a bid to capacitate them to be able to carry out the surgeries in Zimbabwe.
“We offered the maxillofacial training to surgeons who came to be part of the team the whole entire time of the mission so that they could benefit from additional surgical training that they already had.
It is our hope that one day they will be able to do the surgeries we do so that they take care of children in the country and we move on to a country that might need us,” said Mrs Trubenbach.
She said her team was also alive to the challenges that local surgeons have and how hard it is to perform the surgeries due to limited resources.
“This is a specialised surgery, it takes more than a week in the operating room to learn, these surgeons we brought that are training locals, have eight to 10 years of training so it is a lot of complex training that takes time.
“This is the programme that we want to build in Zimbabwe that eventually we can ask the local surgeons to take care of some of the patients that we have locally for free every month,” she added.
She said this will ensure that there will not be any backlogs for children needing cleft lip and palate surgeries in Zimbabwe.
Furthermore, Mrs Trubenbach said post-operative care for these maxillofacial surgeries is always a challenge.
“We know that the hospital has its own challenges so we try to sort them out.
We respect these challenges that local doctors are working with on a day-to-day basis.
On the other hand, we have been able to partner with the local surgeons so that when we leave Zimbabwe, we don’t leave problems and burden the hospital as these patients who have been operated during our mission are under their care and continue to be safe with local doctors,” she added.
The Operation of Hope Worldwide team said parents with children who are born with cleft lip and palate must bring their children in need for facial reconstructive surgery.
“Correcting a cleft lip is a 45-minute procedure.
Again, they need to know that it is no fault of the mother that they gave birth to a child like that, they are born that way.
We can take care of it and that child can go back to school and church because they are not at fault.
I highly encourage parents that there is no other intervention to deal with cleft lip or palate beside surgical intervention,” she said.
The Operation of Hope Worldwide team comprised 25 people and 68 volunteers.
The organisation is based in the United States of America. – @NyembeziMu
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