Masimo announced that it is partnering with Smile Train to help ensure the safety of patients undergoing cleft lip and/or palate surgery in low-resource settings around the world.
Patient monitoring, including the use of pulse oximetry, is a key part of ensuring safe surgical care; however, in lower-resource settings essential monitoring equipment is often unavailable, particularly in the post-operative period.1
Working together, Smile Train and Masimo are helping to remove this barrier by equipping surgical programs in 15 countries in Asia, Africa, Central America, and the Middle East with pulse oximeters.
Smile Train is an international organization that leverages the “teach a man to fish” model to train and empower local medical professionals to provide safe, high-quality, comprehensive cleft treatment for children in their own communities. Through Smile Train’s local partnerships in 85+ countries, the organization has provided more than 1,000,000 cleft surgeries to date.
Through this partnership, Masimo is providing over 460 Masimo SET® Measure-through Motion and Low Perfusion™ pulse oximeters to Smile Train’s nurse training programs and partner hospitals to support improved patient monitoring and safety.
Additionally, Masimo and Smile Train will work together to develop additional initiatives to ensure that post-operative pulse oximetry can be scaled across all Smile Train programs.
One of the most common birth defects in the world, a cleft lip and/or palate occurs before a child is born, when the lip and/or roof of the mouth fail to fuse together properly during fetal development. In higher-resource settings virtually all babies with clefts have reconstructive surgery as it is relatively simple, inexpensive, and immediately transformative.
This is not the case in lower-resource settings, where, as highlighted by the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists’ SAFE-T Campaign, an estimated 70% of the world’s population do not have access to safe and affordable anesthesia and surgical care.1,2
This startling gap in surgical access means the estimated 170,000 children born with clefts in lower-resource settings do not receive surgical treatment and live with difficulties eating, breathing, speaking, and, in the longer term, are less likely to enroll in school or hold jobs due to the stigmas associated with physical defects.3
“Proper surgical monitoring, including essential pulse oximetry, is crucially important to ensuring safe surgical outcomes. Smile Train is excited to partner with Masimo to make their high-performing, Signal Extraction Technology pulse oximeters available at Smile Train partner hospitals as we work together to continue providing safe and quality cleft care to children in need all over the world,” said Susannah Schaefer, CEO of Smile Train.