Surgical Outreach
The Division of Plastic Surgery has a long history of surgical outreach offering our expertise to areas of the world less fortunate. In the early 80s, our division led many multidisciplinary burn treatment and education missions to Guayaquil, Ecuador in conjunction with the Boston based charitable organization “Por Cristo.” Dr. Howard Clarke and Dr. Ron Zuker worked with the Guayaquil team; making visits two or three times per year to establish an up to date burn management centre. It went on to function on its own providing care to countless unfortunate children. In the nineties Dr. William Lindsay, through a CIDA grant, created a wonderful burn education exchange program with the burn care providers in Lanzhou, China. The Chinese teams visited burn centres in Toronto and many burn surgeons from Toronto taught and operated in China.
In addition to burn care, the other area that we have focused on is cleft lip and palate surgery. Dr. Ronald Zuker and Dr. David Fisher have worked extensively with the Norfolk based charitable organization “Operation Smile,” providing free cleft surgeries through missions in Kenya, The Philippines, China, India, Egypt, Morocco, Cambodia and Brazil. Many non surgical members of our multidisciplinary cleft team at SickKids have also taken part in these rewarding missions. Dr. Ronald Zuker plays an active role on the executive of the organization and has recently set up the Operation Smile – SickKids Educational Exchange Program with West Bengal and Assam, India.
In addition to our involvement with Operation Smile, our Division has also participated in The SickKids “No Boundaries” missions to Peru and Nepal.
All members of our Division are willing to give advice regarding complex problems that would benefit from our input without charge to anyone in the developing world. We have often provided free surgical service when we are able to operate on these children at SickKids, either through the Herbie Fund, or other charitable groups. We are proud of our involvement in surgical outreach and hope to continue it in the future.