Focus on Safety And Quality of Care

“When we look back in five or ten years, we don’t want to just say we provided X number of surgeries,” says Dr. Joseph G. McCarthy, Chairman of The Smile Train Medical Advisory Board. “We want to be able to show that we helped improve the safety and quality of cleft care around the world. Any doctor can provide free cleft surgery for a poor child, but to provide high-quality care in a safe, professional environment is something to be proud of and what our free education and training programs are all about.”

In 2002, The Smile Train will be offering many new programs and initiatives that will help thousands of doctors and medical professionals improve their skills, raise their standards, and enhance the quality of care they provide.

Smile Train educational programs begin with symposiums that teach hundreds, sometimes thousands, of doctors at a time such as our 1st Smile Train Latin American Cleft Symposium in Brazil in March, and our Smile Train Speech Therapy Symposium in China this June. In addition, we support all kinds of invaluable third-party educational programs such as the Setting the Standards Cleft Conference in Mexico in February 2002, a workshop on Surgical Techniques in Cleft Lip and Palate this July in Taiwan, and Cleft 2002 in Munich this Fall. We always encourage and sometimes help our partners to attend these programs.

We offer all kinds of innovative teaching materials and resources. Our new Virtual Surgery Training Videos take cleft surgical training to an entirely new level. Through the use of virtual surgery software developed by Dr. Court B. Cutting of NYU Medical Center and advanced 3-D imaging technology, even the most complex surgical techniques are easily explained and demonstrated. These videos help surgeons absorb and retain complex information in a fraction of the time it used to take.

We’ve also developed the world’s largest online cleft library, which is available on our website. This library contains tens of thousands of pages of invaluable cleft medical content from the top medical journals in the world.

It is often said that good record-keeping makes for good medicine. That is why we developed an online, state-of-the-art cleft patient record database. Now any doctor, hospital or clinic can save all of their patient charts complete with pictures on the web, with Smile Train Express. It, too, is free to anyone who wishes to use it, and a free demo is available on our website.

Last, but not least, the Smile Train Medical Advisory Board has developed a Cleft Safety and Quality Protocol that is currently being used by hundreds of our partners around the world. This Protocol, which is continually reviewed and improved upon, sets the standard for safe, smart, high-quality cleft care in developing countries.