Get to Know Our Services
Comprehensive Cleft Care
Operation Smile recognizes that a comprehensive care model should extend beyond surgery to support the complete rehabilitation of patients and facilitate the patient and the family’s social inclusion.
Our comprehensive care model offers quality, patient-centered, and continuous cleft treatment. Our multidisciplinary team of specialists provides care through our dental programs, speech clinics, nutrition clinics, and psychological support. These programs are provided in conjunction with cleft programs in a hospital setting, or as stand-alone programs at our Care Centres.
Comprehensive cleft care should be well-timed and sequenced to optimize patient outcomes. Access to these services can be limited due to financial and structural barriers.
Cleft Care & Nutrition
Our global nutrition programs offer a holistic approach to ensure patients receive safe, timely and effective surgical care. Nutrition and feeding are at the core of our comprehensive care model that aims to support optimal growth and development of patients.
This is achieved by:
- Nurturing Patients: Providing nutrition care through screening for and early identification of malnutrition, delivery of evidence-based nutrition interventions, routine nutritional monitoring and referrals to local healthcare providers.
- Empowering Professionals: Supporting capacity building in local communities by training health workers, community health volunteers, and midwives in basic nutrition care in service to the greater community, especially patients with cleft lip and palate.
- Uplifting families: Increasing caregiver knowledge of nutritious and safe foods that are available, affordable and accessible to empower families to make healthy dietary choices.