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Operation Airway exists within Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary’s not-for-profit organization (501-C3), based in Boston, Massachusetts, to provide high quality and compassionate surgical and medical care pro-bono to needy children and teenagers around the world. Our aim to make life-changing airway reconstructive surgery and post-operative care available to all children who cannot breathe or speak on their own. We are a group of physicians from Mass. Eye and Ear and Mass General who carry out surgical procedures in the US and abroad to restore and rebuild children’s airways. We perform surgery on children who have tracheotomies due to vocal cord paralysis, subglottic stenosis, tracheal stenosis, as well as a host of congenital and acquired problems, aiming to free them of tracheotomy tubes and enable them to breathe, speak, and swallow on their own.
While on surgical mission trips abroad, we aim to educate physicians on surgical and medical care of these complex patients. This ensures that when our mission is complete, we leave knowing the local physicians are able to provide the same care independently.
The Need
In developing countries, many indigent children born and quickly develop infections, sepsis, and pneumonia, or suffer from trauma and need to be intubated and on ventilators while they heal. The very breathing tubes that are available to help save their lives are too large for their airways and there are too few medicines to help sedate these children while they are intubated so they thrash about, spit these tubes out, need to be re-intubated, and all this movement and rubbing causes scars in these children’s airways that requires many of them to have tracheostomies in their neck to allow them to breathe. But, in so many of these countries, these children then remain with their tracheostomies with no surgeons trained to open and rebuild their airways, remove these scars, and allow these children to speak and breathe on their own. These children often can’t speak, don’t go to school, can have their trach tubes plugged due to poor to on-existent suction equipment, and die. Operation Airway intends to bring a real solution to these children and their families. wewe need your support to help save these children’s lives.
Our Mission
The Mission of Operation Airway is to help these children breathe as “to live is to breath”. Our primary goal is to educate the local health care team so they develop their own sustainable programs to care for their own children. Our secondary goal is to work together on research to help change the way we care for children today and make it even better tomorrow
We hope that our missions will represent partnerships between the in-country medical community and Operation Airway to provide high quality treatment to their children long after we have moved on to help another country.
How We Do It
Operation Airway is able to fulfill its Mission by collaborating with medical practitioners in host countries. In some countries, an established or semi-established airway programs exists, and host country physicians request the participation of Operation Airway to help educate, train and mentor their team. Before making a commitment to a specific country, we will travel to the country to meet with medical and hospital personnel as well as local non-profits, government officials and sometimes even the local clergy. Provided all parties agree to the goals and objectives of Heart Care International, we will commit a minimum of 3-5 years to provide life-saving surgical treatments, education and training.
