Who are you trying to help? What issue are you trying to address?

Healing Little Hearts is a UK based charity set up to make a contribution towards the paucity of health care for the large number of babies and children with correctable congenital heart defects in India. We send teams of doctors and nurses to India every two months to perform low cost heart surgery on children who need it and to provide post operative care.

Every year 80,000 children in India are born with defects in their hearts requiring surgery. Of these, only 10,000 get any form of surgery which means that every year 70,000 children do not get the corrective surgery they need, even though most of the defects are correctable so that if they get the right type of surgery at the right time, the children can usually lead normal lives.

There are few local surgical centres in India, and whilst these centres have very hard- working teams of doctors and nurses, they also have very long waiting lists with limited facilities and expertise meaning that many corrective surgeries that are routinely performed in the west and cure the child for life cannot be performed in these facilities.

What is your project and how will it help?

The HLH team of doctors and nurses flies out every 4-6 weeks, and operates on 10 children during the week.

So far HLH has operated on over 230 children with a success rate of > 94%.

Whilst we are in Mumbai, we teach and build up the local service at the Holy Family Hospital

We want to continue to do this, but are looking for funds to enable us to continue.

How can other people partner with you on your project?

By providing help with travel costs and accommodation costs or a link with the 3 most common airlines that HLH volunteers use, Jet Airways, British Airways and Emirates

It costs £6,000 per trip to send a team of doctors and nurses to the Holy Family Hospital.

Please detail the resources that you need.

It costs £6,000 per trip to send a team of doctors and nurses to the Holy Family Hospital.

This cost includes air fare and accommodation and all the doctors and nurses give their time for free.

Other resources could potentially include help with paying for the operations at the host hospital, Holy Family, because the hospital, of course, has to cover its overheads per patient in order that this venture is financially viable.

Each Open Heart Surgery costs £1,500/ compared to £9,000 in the UK.