From November 7th to November 16th, 2024, Healing Little Hearts (HLH) held a transformative cardiac camp at M.P Shah Hospital. During the Camp, more than 100 children were screened, and over 27 life-saving cardiac procedures completed.
Healing Little Hearts (HLH) is a small charity with a bold vision, aims to ensure that every child requiring heart surgery has access to it, regardless of their financial circumstances. Since its founding, HLH has surpassed more than 300 cases and seen more than 2000 children with congenital heart disease.
The camp was powered entirely by volunteers who donated their time and expertise. These dedicated medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, and allied health workers, offered their services for free, embodying the charity’s mission of selflessness and compassion.
The HLH/M.P. Shah team is spearheaded by Dr. Salim Jivanji (Paediatric Cardiologist) and Dr. Bhupi Reel (Paediatric Intensivist) and Healing Little Hearts (HLH) Charity and doctors from Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, UK. The team consists of cardiac surgeons, cardiologists, anaesthetists, intensivists and nurses. Every May and November, the team initially conduct a heart screening camp for children followed by procedures to repair these heart defects. The 2-week missions offer specialized corrective operations that provide life-saving care to many young lives in Kenya.
Determined to expand the program, Healing Little Hearts is set to significantly scale its operations in Kenya. The organization is focused to not only do the congenital heart defects but a series of initiatives during its upcoming camp aimed at addressing the growing burden of rheumatic heart disease in both children and adults and doubling the number of surgeries performed annually, to an impressive 150 cases. For this goal to be met, the team plans to increase its presence in Kenya, allowing its team to spend more time to train local medical professionals to ensure more than a third of all surgeries expected to be performed independently by Kenyan medical teams with minimal external support.
The difficulty of maintaining such program lies in its financial strength. Each cardiac interventional procedure costs on average Ksh 800,000 and open-heart cases cost on average Ksh 1,200,000. Any post-operative complications have resulted in costs of over Ksh 2,000,000 per case. M.P. Shah Hospital has caters for this cost primarily from donors, particularly, the Jain Social Group and being a Social Service League, partly from income generated by the Children’s Hospital.
