Take Heart Mercy Mission: Saving the lives of Sri Lanka’s underprivileged children

By Shannine Daniel 

Every year about 250,000 children in Sri Lanka are born with heart defects and for the past 12 years a dedicated team of doctors, surgeons and nurses from the Evelina Children’s Hospital in London have been giving up a week of their much deserved personal holiday and have travelled 6,000 miles to Sri Lanka to perform surgeries on children suffering from various heart ailments. 

Every year they visit the cardiothoracic unit of the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital in Galle and throughout this time period they have completed 210 surgeries on infants and children up to the age of 18 years and have also committed their time to pass on the expertise gained in British hospitals to medical teams in Sri Lanka.

This benevolent charity initiative is known as Take Heart Mercy Mission which was officially formed in 2012 has two major aims, firstly to provide an expert team of cardiac surgical, anaesthetic and intensive care personnel to perform operations on children with congenital cardiac conditions, and secondly to manage the intensive care unit until the patients are fit and stable enough to be discharged into a regular hospital ward.

Since Friday 14 October the team has been in the island and within a span of 10 days they had planned on operating on 21 seriously ill children.

Speaking to the Daily FT Dr. Paul Scally the Chairman and one of the trustees of Take Heart revealed that this initiative was originally the brain child of a Sri Lankan expat living in London named Jai Lameer, after he had heart surgery successfully performed on him by Dr. Conal Austin. After Jai unfortunately passed away in 2011 due to cancer Dr. Scally, Dr. Austin along with leading cardiologist Professor John Simpson took it up upon them to continue his legacy. 

Previously the three of them along with the rest of the 18 member medical team had been visiting Sri Lanka under the organisation known as Mercy Mission, and after the organisational change, Take Heart Mercy Mission is currently the leading British based Sri Lankan Charity in the UK, having acquired half a million pounds worth of equipment for the cardiothoracic unit of the hospital in Karapitiya over a span of 12 years. 

“The objective was to teach, to help the local doctors and to provide them with additional equipment and motivation that they need to conduct this type of work,” asserted Dr. Austin. 

In addition to this, the Evelina Children’s Hospital team provides daily lecture programs, teaching practical operative experience, anaesthetic instructions and consultant-led specialist intensive care management, to benefit Sri Lankan medics in the longer term. Professor Simpson himself had conducted seminars at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital in Colombo. 

According to Dr. Scally, many of these children they perform surgeries on are critically ill and the risk of their death is very high, making surgery the only if not much required choice.  

“In the western developed countries mothers are scanned when they are pregnant so diseases and irregularities are detected early among these children. But this does not happen in Sri Lanka; until the children fall visibly ill the parents do not know that there is something wrong, and by then most often it is too late to save their lives,”  Dr. Scally revealed in concern over the high number of deaths due to heart conditions among young children.  

This is probably the foremost reason as to why many young children in Sri Lanka become the victims of heart disease and heart ailments. Fortunately the Take Heart Mercy Mission team enjoys a pretty good success rate of 19 out of 21 surgeries performed annually at Karapitiya. 

“We are delighted to have lots of success stories since we are involved in a ‘risk business’ where outcome determines either life or death. But we have a pretty strong team and everybody does their job well and is professional in doing so,” Dr. Scally remarked. 

“For the past few years hundreds of people have come up from all parts of the island to get their children treated at the hospital,” he added. 

The team had also born witness to several unusual cases of heart ailments in children and Professor Simpson and Dr. Austin specialise in treating these children who have malformations of the heart, and these are cases where the structure of a child’s heart functionally abnormal. 

“It’s quite different from other surgeons who operate on adult patients who have developed heart diseases in their coronary arteries or in the aortic valves. The children we operate on have been born with these conditions,” said Dr. Austin.

“There are a multitude of different types of malformations of the heart. The ones we witness at Karapitiya mostly include obstructions to the blood flow of the lungs which make the children blue, therefore a lot of the operations that we have been doing up to date focus on improving the blood supply to the heart and closing holes inside the heart,” he added. 

Most often the doctors are unsure as to why these various abnormalities occur in young children. 

“It could be a result of a well-known genetic disorder, for example if a child has Down syndrome, he or she could also have a heart condition. But many children do not have an obvious genetic disorder,” stated Professor Simpson. 

“We do know that it runs in some families, so they have more risk than others. And it’s actually quite common; for example one in 200 babies born could have a heart condition that we will need to do something about and it is usually a very common type of heart malformation. These conditions are also one of the most common causes of disability as well as death in young children if nothing is done about it,” the Professor added. 

During the 2016 mission of Take Heart Professor Simpson had scanned about 150 children and the team had to select 20 of them who are critically in need of life saving surgery; as of now roughly ten of them have been operated on successfully. 

The team is similarly looking at working in hospitals in other rural areas such as Jaffna where there is a vital need for improvement in cardiothoracic surgery. 

“This is a charity that can do a lot for Sri Lanka, and we feel that we will be very well welcomed by the national hospitals like Lady Ridgeway and even the local hospitals,” asserted Dr. Scally. 

In terms of funding the charity raises 50,000 pounds a year through an annual charity ball as well as a charity bicycle race and several auctions held in the UK. Professor Simpson also revealed that recently they have begun looking at wider ideas for fundraising so that they could focus on getting better equipment and re-equip the cardiothoracic unit at the hospital. 

The Elliot Scally fund, an initiative founded by Dr. Scally and his wife in memory of their three month old son Elliot whom they lost to an unsuccessful heart surgery in 2003, and the Gillingham Football Club (GFC) play an imperative role in bringing the necessary donations for Take Heart Mercy Mission to conduct its work here in Sri Lanka. Moreover from this year onwards the initiative will also partner with Sri Lankan Airlines who sponsored the team’s flight here from London and will keep doing so in future. 

Aside from providing the necessary funding for Take Heart Mercy Mission the GFC also participates in the charity in their own way; by coaching poverty stricken children in Karapitiya and the surrounding areas of Galle for one week.

Each year a handful of GFC Community Trust coaches travel to Sri Lanka along with the medical team who visit the island every year. They also bring along all the bibs, cones, balls and other compulsory equipment that is needed for the week’s long football training camp and they have received much praise and appreciation for their support. This year the camp will bring together about 400 children from Galle and the surrounding vicinity and will take place at Aloysius College. 

Pix by Samantha Perera