Nurses make children smile
Registered nurse Diana Gilbert remembers her first Operation Smile mission well.
Families had been lined up for days, waiting for nurses, doctors and other medical personnel to arrive at the hospital in Linyi, China, their children in tow. The hospital set up a parade—complete with a dragon and Chinese musician—for the medical team. Nurses stood at attention. Parents showed up in their best clothes, the men wearing hats and jackets.
“Then they just hand you their child, their most prized possession,” Gilbert says. “It brought tears to our eyes.”
Gilbert is one of about 3,000 nurses who volunteer their time and expertise to Operation Smile, a 28-year-old organization that sends volunteer medical teams worldwide to perform free surgeries on children who have cleft lips, cleft palates or other facial deformities. According to Operation Smile, a cleft lip is an opening in the lip, the roof of the mouth or the soft tissue in the back of the mouth, and a cleft palate occurs when the two sides of a palate do not fuse together, resulting in an opening in the roof of the mouth.
The Norfolk, Va.–based organization reports that a child is born with a cleft condition every three minutes, and more than 200,000 children worldwide are born with a severe cleft condition every year—often unable to speak, eat, socialize or smile. Many of these children are also shunned by society, or even their parents.
“Orphanages are filled with Chinese baby girls with cleft lips,” Gilbert says. “Two of the kids on my last mission were found in the trash.”
Currently, Operation Smile has a presence in more than 50 countries, and the organization’s volunteers often travel to rural areas where medical help is difficult for families to obtain. Gilbert alone has been not only to China but to Peru, Venezuela, Cambodia and Vietnam. To date, medical professionals—who come from all over the globe and volunteer about 11 days of their time per mission—have completed more than 150,000 surgeries on children worldwide. These professionals include surgeons, anesthesiologists, dentists, nurses and others. The organization also brings its own equipment.
Linda Highfield, chair of Operation Smile’s Nursing Council, says the organization recruits nurses. Those who apply to volunteer with the organization must meet certain criteria. They must have at least two years of consecutive experience as an R.N. after they graduate from nursing school and must have experience as postanesthesia (recovery room) nurses in pediatric intensive care units or neonatal intensive care units, perioperative (operating room) nurses or pre/post-op ward nurses, preferably working with pediatric patients. Emergency room nurses are also accepted. All approved applicants must have certifications in Basic Life Support and Pediatric Advance Life Support, and these are certifications that renew biannually, she says.
Once approved, nurses can apply to go on various missions. The organization typically sends at least one new nurse in each of Operation Smile’s three specialties on every mission, Highfield says. She notes that each volunteer pays a $500 team fee, which helps with airfare, accommodations and food.
Once at the mission site, the days are long, and there is only one day off, but the emotional rewards are great because lives are changed—for the children, their families and the community in which they live.
“Once we get [nurses] on a mission, it’s a rare individual who isn’t totally ready to go on another one,” she says. Since surgeries cannot be performed on all the children who show up with their parents, medical teams continue to return to locations on follow-up dates.
Gilbert says it’s important that medical professionals be “flexible” and not rigid, due to unexpected conditions at the sites. “Sometimes we have to turn a storeroom into an operating room or a storage spot into a recovery room,” she says. “You have to be open-minded, extremely respectful of everyone and the people we serve—and you have to have a sense of adventure.”
Highfield, who has volunteered for Operation Smile for 18 years, has been on 40 missions to countries such as Colombia, the Philippines, Rwanda and Belarus, among others. In November, she flew to Guwahati, India. “I go where I’m needed,” she says. “It’s been such an eye-opener for me. If I had never stepped outside the box 18 years ago and said I’ll go. I don’t know where I’d be today. I’m such a different person than I would have been if I had never experienced it.”
