Situation: Millions of poor children around the world have no access to basic medical care, let alone the reconstructive plastic surgery they need to lead normal, productive lives.

Interplast provides nearly 4,000 free surgeries each year.

Children with congenital deformities, like cleft lips or palates, are often ostracized from their communities and denied an education simply because they look or speak differently. Accident victims, many burn-related, also endure a lifetime of suffering and disability for the simple reason that they have no access to the surgeries that would give them back the use of their hands or the freedom to move their limbs or improve their physical appearance. The sad and startling fact is that only three percent of disabled children in the developing world attend school.

Few plastic surgeons are available to perform the needed surgeries in the developing world. In Zambia, for instance, a country of 10 million people, there is only one plastic surgeon. Additionally, poor families just can’t afford the medical help their children require. By contrast, in the United States, most families—even those without health insurance—have access to immediate medical attention and the kind of surgical intervention that can make a critical difference in their children's lives.

Solution: Interplast's programs provide corrective surgery and related care for the world’s poor. By doing so we not only heal bodies, we help children gain access to the most basic of needs—things like attending school and gaining a livelihood. The organization's scope of services includes:

• Supporting 12 permanent Surgical Outreach Centers in nine countries, creating long-term, year-round surgical care where it never existed before. More than 60 percent of all Interplast surgeries are performed by developing world surgeons.
• Teaching 600 overseas medical professionals every year to perform surgeries more safely, effectively and efficiently on their own.
• Sending Volunteer Medical Teams to the developing world, helping local surgeons reduce the backlog of cases and providing hands-on training.
• Using technology in innovative ways to provide medical education and tools for collaboration with surgeons in developing countries.
• Providing therapeutic follow-up services such as speech, hand and physical therapy to help rehabilitate our patients.
• Providing advanced training opportunities for skilled and dedicated health care providers from developing countries to study in the United States and other countries, so that they can bring these skills back to patients in their own communities.
• Administering the Webster Fellowship for a newly trained, board-eligible plastic surgeon to spend a year working with Interplast's medical colleagues in developing countries.

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