Cape Coast Teaching Hospital performs cleft lip surgery

Operation Smile, an International Non-Governmental Organization from the USA in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Cape Coast Teaching Hospital (CCTH) are undertaking a corrective surgery on cleft lips at CCTH.

The CCTH, as part of its collaborative mandate, has given the hospital facility with three operation rooms for the exercise, which begins on April 13 and is expected to end on April 20, 2015.

CCTH is also supporting Operation Smile with some of its staff, particularly in the area of nursing and administrative support and provision of equipment for screening, including other logistics.

The patients, comprising Children and Adults are being admitted in various wards of the hospital, such as the Paediatric, Male and Female Surgical wards.

In all, ninety-two patients are expected to benefit from the exercise and these people were brought from the various parts of the country.

The Operation Smile group since the beginning of the exercise last week has screened over four hundred patients with various ailments such as burns, scars, big tumor cases etc. Those with Cleft Lip cases were considered, as it was the main purpose for the exercise.

Members of the Operation Smile numbering about forty-five volunteers are drawn from countries like Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, Sweden, Canada UK, Egypt and Kenya.

Operation Smile is an international children’s medical charity that performs safe, effective cleft lip and cleft palate surgery, and delivers postoperative and ongoing medical therapies to children in low and middle income countries.