“Close to 20,000 smiles restored in NE in a decade”
GUWAHATI: Mission Smile is now looking for greater support from the state governments and public sector undertakings in the Northeast to provide enhanced treatment and perform expensive critical surgeries on cleft patients on a regular basis here.
Currently, a team of doctors under a Sweden-based NGO are assisting the team at the Guwahati Comprehensive Cleft Care Centre to screen cleft patients with multiple disorders such as cardiac, neurological, tessiar 4 (a deformity that extends to the eyes and affects eyesight), difficult airway and malnourishment .
A team of seven doctors from the Swedish NGO, Second Chance, are assisting the medical team with the surgeries during the Difficult Cases Week that started on Sunday.
As many as 130 patients, with 15 from Meghalaya, have been screened so far even as Mission Smile aims to perform over 60 surgeries during the week.
“Such surgeries to treat multiple-defect cases cost almost three times more than the normal cleft surgeries and we are so far bearing the additional cost burden. So while the government is providing 50 per cent cost of the surgeries, we would like more support in such cases for performing more such surgeries,” Dipul Malakar, assistant general manager (programme and partnerships), Mission Smile, told The Shillong Times here on Monday.
A normal cleft surgery costs between Rs 35,000 to Rs 45,000 at the Guwahati Comprehensive Cleft Care Centre.
“We have tied up with Indian Oil Corporation recently and the PSU has agreed to provide 50 per cent of the surgery cost of 345 cases between October 2019 and February 2020. There are as many as 120 beneficiaries under this scheme from Meghalaya while the rest are from Assam,” Malakar said.
“Besides, ONGC has promised to fund 50 per cent of the cost of 60 surgeries in Tripura in this financial year,” he added.
He further said that cleft treatment goes beyond just surgeries as constant follow-up and rehabilitation is needed to cure other defects and reestablish a patient back in society.
“At Mission Smile, we do a lot of research and ground work to help give patients a second chance. We take the effort to identify and convince people to come for treatment and in states such as Meghalaya, we have faced difficulties in overcoming language barriers for which many do not either turn up or fail to revisit the centre here,” Malakar said.
As it is after forging tie-ups with three Northeastern states – Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, Mission Smile is now in the process of partnering with Arunachal Pradesh in its bid to cover the entire region in the coming years.
“We already have the support of three Northeast governments, and by the end of this financial year, we will have Arunachal Pradesh on board. In the coming years, we will engage with the other states of the region as we look to make the region cleft (backlog cases) free in the next five years,” he said.
As on date, Mission Smile has completed 1287 cleft (lip and palate) surgeries in Meghalaya of the 19,929 surgeries in Northeast since the year 2010, over 17,000 of which have been performed in Assam alone.
One significant development of late is that Mision Smile has tied up with Sankardev Nethralaya here to perform eye prosthesis and cosmetic surgeries on tessiar 4 cleft patients. “Eight cases have been listed while we have today decided to perform such a corrective surgery on two patients to replace the natural eye with an artificial one,” Dr Hiteswar Sarma, medical director and general manager, Mission Smile, informed.