Healing
Hearts
Congenital heart disease is a serious problem facing thousands
of Arab children in the Middle East. Each year, hundreds
of babies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are born with
this life-threatening disease. In Iraq, thousands of babies
are born with heart disease each year. Unfortunately for
these sick children, there was no local pediatric cardiac
surgery center in either Palestine or Iraq to provide them
the treatment they needed to live a normal life and a majority
of these babies would needlessly die due to the lack of
a pediatric cardiac surgery center.
To address this problem, in 1998 the PCRF launched a “Healing
Hearts” campaign to send teams of volunteer doctors
and nurses to provide expert surgical treatment for sick
children, as well as training for the local staff. Since
then, the PCRF has sent dozens of volunteer missions to
the West Bank and Gaza to provide life-saving open-heart
surgery for sick and dying Palestinian babies, as well as
teams that treat adults with heart conditions.
In addition to sending volunteer teams to work in the Middle
East in cardiac surgery, the PCRF has also located and sponsored
open-heart surgery for hundreds of Arab children by sending
them outside for surgery. The objective of this campaign
is to provide life saving surgery on the short-term, and
to help build a working pediatric cardiac surgery program
on the ground there by working with local Ministries of
Health to develop a long-term program to deal the problem
of congenital heart disease so eventually children with
heart disease can treat themselves.
In 2006, The PCRF opened a brand new, fully-equipped pediatric
ICU in Makassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
This is the only pediatric ICU in all of Palestine. The
PCRF will continually bring medical teams to work in the
new ICU to both treat patients and train the local staff.
The hope is that one day the local medical staff will be
trained and equipped enough to perform these life-saving
surgeries unassisted. |
