Ian introduced our speaker Dr John Oswald from Interplast
 
He is an anesthetist and does marvelous work with Interplast and has done over 24 overseas trips to assist those in need.

Dr Oswald titles his presentation “Repairing Bodies and Rebuilding Lives”

John said most of the trips had been to Indonesia, PNG, Fiji, and Vanuatu.
 
Interplast provides reconstructive surgery, nurses, and teaching.

Most teams consist of plastic surgeons, registrar and nurses and result in good relations between the country and Australia.
His Interplast journey began in 1983 when he visited Fiji.
 
He saw children with cleft palate which in Australia would have been treated at birth but had remained untreated.
It has now done 135 trips to Fiji and now works in 17 countries and maintains contact by mentoring surgical teams and has performed 26510 surgeries and 8120 training opportunities.

They treat mainly cleft lip and cleft palate which disfigures and affects the health and wellbeing of the person.
 
In Borneo which has 9 million people one in 1000 will display cases of cleft lip or cleft palate and they would do 3 to 40 operations a year. Each operation takes about 2 ½ hours and another 1 hour to repair the lip.

Other conditions treated are severe burns especially to the head. In these cases, the normal function of the skin is locked by scar tissue from the burn. The patient finds it hard to breathe and swallow.
 
They need to remove the scar tissue and replace with grafted tissues.
 

He showed photos showing the patients before the treatment and after with a beaming smile.
 

During the Covid-19 pandemic they were unable to visit the countries so instead ran over 91 hours of webinars and remote training to 38 countries.
 
They also supplied equipment and arranged direct funding of overseas hospitals to undertake surgery.

There is a company Molination Australia who were providing rehabilitative equipment to Sth Pacific nations.
 
He was seeking a global Rotary grant to send rehabilitation clinicians to the areas.
 
The company went into financial hardship and has now been taken over by Interplast and will have teams going out in the next few months.
 
It is hoped that 20000 cases will be looked at and attended to by the end of this decade.
 
They provide teaching and compassionate surgery and build strong community.
 
It is preferable for all cases to be done in their own town.
 
So, he is trying to obtain a global grant over 2 years of US$40000.
 
If you can help then please contact us through contact details on the home page.