Founders Message

"In my opinion, the best way to illustrate the scale of a problem is with the help of statistics. Every year in India, there are 250,000 to 300,000 children born with heart defects." - Dr Sanjiv Nichani   

Out of those about 80,000 children require some form of surgery or intervention and out of these 80,000 children only between 8,000 to 10,000 children are fortunate enough to avail of the required intervention or surgery. Therefore only one in ten childern receive any definative treatement.

That leaves a staggering 70,000 children  per year with heart problems who have no access to the required expertise that will allow them to go onto live long fruitful lives.
It is  worth remembering that this happens every year and indeed has been happening year on year for decades in India.

Please indulge me and digest another mind boggling comparison:

The UK has 10 Children Heart  centres for a population of 60 million people whilst India has the same number of children’s heart centres  for a population of over of over a billion!

I am sure you will agree with me that numbers are shocking and almost beyond belief and comprehension.

Healing Little Hearts has been set up to try to help address this huge inequity and we aim to do that by flying out complete teams of doctors and nurses  to the Asian Heart Institute in Mumbai every month to perform life saving heart surgery on children.

During each trip, we aim to operate on between 10 and 15 children and also train the team at Asian Heart to become self sufficient over time.

It costs between £2,000 to £3,000 to send a team to Mumbai, depending on the time of year and each trip will be life changing for 96% of the children whom we treat.

I will leave you to do the maths yourself as to the cost benefit ratio!

Why are we doing this? Well apart from the staggering statistics, this is about giving something back  since most of us in the West lead  comfortable, healthy and relatively stress free lives.

Trust me, there is NO GREATER SENSE OF SATISFACTION than watching beaming ecstatic parents taking their child home having been given a new lease of life.

Please be part of this endeavour, infact let’s make it our journey together to make a difference to these unfortunate children so that  5 years from now and 5 years after that and so on, we can look back and say that together we have been able to transform  the lives of hundreds if not thousands of children.

Thank you

Dr Sanjiv Nichani    

 

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