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Working in the underserved regions of 16 countries throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America, Interplast teaches, empowers and partners with volunteers and overseas medical professionals so every child living in poverty has free access to the safest and highest quality care, now and in the future.
This year, Interplast will send Visiting Educators to Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nicaragua, Peru, Vietnam and Zambia to teach 600 overseas medical professionals to perform surgeries safely, effectively and efficiently on their own. Interplast also will send 14 Volunteer Medical Teams to empower developing world surgeons in Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Ecuador, Ethiopia, India, Mali, Peru and Vietnam. Each year, these surgical teams perform 1,500 life-transforming surgeries that help reduce the backlog of cases in those countries. Each team trip also provides hands-on training and education. In addition, team trips are an effective way to interact with the host and the site in order to further educate and to assess needs more fully. Information gathered and relationships built through team trips help determine future Visiting Educator Workshops and often lead to the establishment of a Surgical Outreach Center. The current schedule follows. If you would like to become a medical volunteer or trip coordinator/translator, please see our Volunteer section.
Interplast expanded into Ethiopia in 2007 by offering a combination of team trips and Visiting Educator Workshops. Addis Ababa—with its hospital facility, staff with a strong desire for long-term Interplast involvement and defined patient need—has been the site of Interplast’s surgical team trips. The Visiting Educator Program builds upon the team trip model by bringing opportunities for even more hands-on training to the country’s medical personnel. Workshops on hand surgery have been of particular interest to Ethiopian surgeons and anesthesiologists. Restoring functionality to a young person’s hand is vital in the developing world, where most people must use their hands to carve out their daily living.
In 2006, in response to the defined need, Interplast established two year-round Surgical Outreach Centers: one in Kumasi and a second one in Accra. The center in Kumasi provides year-round care to children and adults with clefts and burns. The Accra center is focused solely on burn repair. Operating in near isolation, Ghana’s six plastic surgeons are eager for the kind of hands-on training provided by Interplast’s Visiting Educator Program. Ongoing workshops on advanced surgical techniques provide invaluable training to Ghana’s plastic surgeons and are a core component of Interplast’s presence in Ghana.
With an understanding of the need in Mali, Interplast expanded its programs to include Mali in 2006. Volunteer surgeons on team trips have performed hundreds of surgeries in Bamako. That translates into hundreds of lives that have been changed by Interplast surgeons in this country that has not a single resident plastic surgeon.
Interplast has been working in Zambia since the late 1990s with Dr. Goran Jovic, the country’s only plastic surgeon. Interplast’s involvement has taken the form of volunteer medical team trips, Visiting Educator Workshops and a Surgical Outreach Center. As the center’s director in Lusaka, Jovic mends clefts, performs hand surgery and releases the contractures caused by disabling burns—giving those patients the ability to talk, walk or use their hands again. Over the years Interplast’s outreach has healed the bodies of nearly 1,000 Zambians.
In 1996, the first Interplast surgical teams visited Dhaka. The volunteers quickly determined a pressing need for year-round access to care in the country. Three years later, following a successful pilot program for a Surgical Outreach Center in neighboring Nepal, Interplast opened one in Dhaka. Working with its partner, Dr. Shafquat Khundkar, Interplast has performed thousands of surgeries to correct disabling burns, clefts and hand injuries. Interplast also sponsors Visiting Educator Workshops and volunteer medical team trips to Bangladesh. Both serve to provide important on-the-job training for the country’s plastic surgeons. For Khundkar, his association with Interplast serves two purposes. It provides professional training and validation, allowing him to become an even better doctor. It also gives special meaning to his life. “This kind of work, it enriches my soul.”
Impoverished families, especially those from rural regions, simply cannot afford the medical help their children require. Despite recent economic progress, more than 17 percent of the Chinese population still lives on less than a dollar per day. The annual health care expenditure per capita is $63; it is $5,274 in the United States. In 2005, Interplast returned to China after nearly a decade-long absence, at the invitation of the China Population Welfare Foundation. Each year since then, Interplast has coordinated two volunteer medical team trips to China, helping reduce the backlog of patients needing cleft surgery and educating local medical professionals through hands-on training and classroom lectures. Valuable additional training takes place at several Visiting Educator Workshops held in different parts of the country each year. Hundreds of rural, impoverished Chinese children have had life-changing surgery since Interplast returned to the country, while local medical professionals have received important advanced medical training.
In 2006, Interplast began programs in Dehradun and Jalandhar. Surgical team trips proved the need for year-round care in both regions, so Interplast established Surgical Outreach Centers dedicated to burn care in these same towns. Seventy percent of India’s burn victims are women and girls. They are often left to spend the remainder of their lives suffering from burn-related disabilities, not because they are irreparable, but because their families cannot afford the necessary medical care. Close to 100 Indian children will receive that much-need care each year at the two Surgical Outreach Centers, thanks to Interplast and its physician partners in India. Ongoing medical volunteer trips will add to those numbers, as well as help reduce the backlog of cases of children with clefts, disabling burns and hand injuries.
Interplast has a long history of involvement in Myanmar—dating back to 1993 when the first volunteer group of surgeons visited the country. It has been a regular trip destination ever since: thousands of surgeries have been performed to correct clefts, disabling burns and hand injuries. In all, more than $4.5 million dollars worth of medical services have been donated to the impoverished people of Myanmar through a combination of Interplast team trips and Visiting Educator Workshops.
In 1999, Dr. Shankar Man Rai, Interplast’s partner in Nepal, assembled a local team of medical professionals to provide free surgeries, speech therapy and other medical services year-round in Kathmandu and rural Nepal. The intrepid band of medical professionals traverse Nepal’s rugged terrain and work around the continuing political upheaval to provide care in even the most remote corners. In its first three years, the Surgical Outreach Center in Nepal treated more than 3,000 patients, more than 10 times more than could have been treated through volunteer direct service trips to that location. It demonstrated that Interplast could dramatically expand access by directing more resources and support to locally managed programs. Today, thanks to the success of the Nepalese model, Interplast operates 12 Surgical Outreach Centers in nine countries. The value of the services provided by the Kathmandu-based center exceeds $1 million.
Interplast opened a Surgical Outreach Center in Colombo with the express purpose of restoring some hope to the lives of these women and children with burn-related injuries. One of the country’s six plastic surgeons, Dr. Chandini Perera, has made burn care her area of expertise. Joining with Interplast, she works to heal hundreds of people suffering from burn-related injuries. To support Dr. Perera further, Interplast provides helpful hands-on training for local medical professionals through periodic Visiting Educator Workshops. Specialized training in hand surgery is particularly useful for local physicians as burns often create such damage to the hands that they can’t be used. In an economy where the poor must use their hands to provide for their own livelihoods, surgery that can restore functionality to the hands is crucial.
Vietnam is emerging as an economic powerhouse. Recently, its economy has been growing at a fast clip—second only to China in Asia. But, like other ascendant economies, the country’s new wealth isn’t being enjoyed equally. The annual per capita health care expenditure in Vietnam is just $23. Compare that to $5,274 in the United States. There are only two doctors for every 4,000 people (in the U.S. there are nearly three doctors for every 1,000 people). Access to medical care in the large rural swaths of the country is difficult at best. Over the years, more than 60 medical volunteer trips have provided tens of millions of dollars of medical services to more than 5,000 patients. In 2003, Interplast brought its successful Visiting Educator Program to Vietnam, providing advanced hands-on training to dozens of Vietnamese physicians. The program offers a world of potential: one specialty-trained surgeon in a developing country has the promise of performing thousands of life-changing surgeries in his/her lifetime.
In 1999, Interplast began sending teams of medical volunteers to Bolivia. A few years later, they were joined in their efforts by Dr. Jorge Terrazas, the country’s lone hand surgeon. Today, Bolivia is the site of both surgical team trips and periodic Visiting Educator Workshops, all focusing on hand surgery. In all, Interplast surgeons have performed nearly 1,000 procedures to heal hands—hands that never fully formed or hands that were maimed in accidents or as the result of a severe burn. According to Beverly Kent, Interplast director of volunteer services, “Our very survival depends on the use of our hands…Hands profoundly affect the ability to survive independently…to eat, to work, to learn.”
Interplast first began working in Brazil in 1995. For nearly a decade, teams of medical volunteers made several trips each year to underserved regions in Brazil. As the medical infrastructure in Brazil improved and with enhanced technology allowing unprecedented levels of support for local physicians, Interplast replaced the surgical team trips with the Visiting Educator Program in 2002. Averaging slightly more than two week-long workshops each year, Interplast is providing valuable training to local medical personnel. A single, trained overseas medical partner can potentially perform 10 times more surgeries than Interplast visiting teams can provide—and for a third of the cost. Interplast’s model of empowerment and sustainability is paving the way for greater numbers of healed bodies and changed lives.
Interplast has had a long-standing relationship with Ecuador; in fact, it is one of the organization’s longest running programs, having been started in 1979. In 1988, Interplast surgical teams began visiting Ecuador regularly, and the organization has returned once or twice a year every year since then. In 2000, a Surgical Outreach Center was opened in Guayaquil, making it possible for the region’s poor to have year-round access to free reconstructive surgical care. Visiting Educator Workshops began being offered in 2001. The workshops have proved so successful at providing valuable hands-on learning opportunities for local medical professionals that several are held each year. Over the decades, Interplast has provided more than $12 million dollars worth of services to help change lives in this equatorial nation that lies on South America’s Pacific coast.
Interplast’s involvement in Nicaragua dates back to 1994, when the first surgical teams visited the country. Many subsequent trips were to ingenios: large sugar cane plantations that operate like small cities. For the past few years, Interplast’s partner in Nicaragua, Dr. Mario Perez, has been directing the Surgical Outreach Center in Managua, providing free reconstructive surgery to those in need in Managua and the surrounding rural areas. Interplast provides additional support and training for local physicians through its Visiting Educator Program. The combination of the surgical team trips (which perform surgeries and provide invaluable on-the-job training), an active Surgical Outreach Center and specialized hands-on training through Visiting Educator Workshops has helped Interplast educate and empower the local medical community. Access to highly trained and supported medical personnel is now available year-round—helping ensure that no human being suffers physically or emotionally from clefts, disabling burns or hand injuries.
Interplast has long been involved in Peru. The organization first began sending surgical team trips to the country in 1981 and continues to this day. Nearly 20 years after the first volunteer medical team trip, a Surgical Outreach Center was opened in Piura. Peru’s improving medical infrastructure and Interplast’s goal of empowering local medical professionals both allows impetus for the center, which provides year-round access to reconstructive surgical care. A few years later, Interplast opened a second Surgical Outreach Center, in Lima. Both centers provide reconstructive surgery to children and adults with disabling burns, clefts and hand disabilities. Interplast is committed to promoting sustainability and self-sufficiency among its Peruvian medical partners. To that end, the Visiting Educator Program was introduced in Peru in 2001. Through surgical team trips, the outreach centers and Visiting Educator Workshops, Interplast has donated nearly $14 million worth of free medical services to Peru’s poor.
Interplast teaches 600 medical professionals overseas each year to perform surgeries safely, effectively and efficiently on their own. Visiting Educator Workshops provide advanced hands-on training in specialized skills and each program is tailored to fit the needs of our partners. 2007- 2008 Visiting Educator Workshops Schedule
2008 - 2009 Visiting Educator Workshop schedule coming soon!
Interplast sends volunteer medical teams to empower developing world surgeons by teaching and performing approximately 1,500 life-transforming surgeries with them each year, helping to reduce the backlog of cases in those countries and to provide hands-on training. Team members staffed on these trips should not plan any international travel one month prior to the Interplast trip due to difficult visa authorization processes. Interplast will hold team members' passports until the visa authorization letter is received and then apply for humanitarian visas. If you would like to become a volunteer, please see our Volunteers page. 2008 - 2009 Tentative Surgical Team Trip Schedule
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