Future of Smiles Mission

Over 1.3 billion people in the world lack access to safe and timely surgery. Today there are more people dying in the world for lack of safe surgery than malaria, TB and HIV combined (The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery, April 2015). The newly formed United Nations Sustainable Development Goals acknowledge the massive need for surgery and over the next few years a significant amount of work within the development sector would be to address the huge backlog of essential surgeries.

For the last 35 years Operation Smile has been working to deliver safe and well times surgical care to the remotest parts of the world. Operation Smile is an international medical charity whose global network of thousands of medical volunteers from more than 80 countries is dedicated to helping improve the health and lives of children from more than 60 countries. Since its founding in 1982, Operation Smile has provided more than 240,000 free surgical procedures for children and young adults born with cleft lip, cleft palate and other facial deformities. To build long-term sufficiency in resource poor environments, Operation Smile trains doctors and local medical professionals in its partner countries so they are empowered to treat their local communities and help others around the world.

Operation Smile Inc. of Virginia Beach, Va., USA, and the Inga Health Foundation of Mumbai, India, entered into a partnership in December 2015 with the objective of increasing the capacity to treat the huge backlog of children suffering from cleft lip and cleft palate in India.

Inga Health Foundation and Operation Smile Inc. in partnership with the IQ City Narayana Multispecialty Hospital hosted ‘The Future of Smile Mission’ an International cleft lip and palate surgery mission, in Durgapur, West Bengal from August 16-23, 2017. Together the three organizations with combine efforts to provide comprehensive medical evaluation to over 198 children with cleft lip and palate deformity and out of them over 140 children had received life changing surgery. This is the first time that an international medical team visited Durgapur to provide life changing surgery to children in need. The mission comprised of multidisciplinary team of medical volunteers from the United States, Sweden, Canada, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Australia, Madagascar and India.