2025 will mark my 3rd trip to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia to perform anesthesia for children undergoing cleft lip and cleft palate repairs. Our group is organized through Healing the Children Northeast, in partnership with the local Rotary club in Bolivia. We provide access to a pediatrician and fellowship trained pediatric anesthesiologists for patient screening and selection. Our group subsequently provides complete surgical care and speech therapy for selected patients with cleft lip and cleft palates. I personally will provide safe anesthesia care for up to 20 children during the 5 surgical days of the mission who are undergoing repair.
The children and families often face barriers to operative repair in Bolivia and many travel for days in order to have the opportunity for their child to have an improved smile, ability to eat, and better speech.
Our team also partners with the local university as well as Bolivian surgeons to improve the communities’ knowledge and abilities to care for this patient population.
The primary beneficiaries of this project are Bolivian babies and children, and their families. Bolivia has a high rate of cleft lip and palates when compared to the United States. The causative factors for this are not entirely clear.
Bolivia also has a deficit of pediatric trained anesthesia providers, further limiting access to safe surgical repair of this condition.
We also serve the local Bolivian hospital staff as much as possible by providing education and including them in components of the cases to enhance the capabilities of the local staff.
We expect to perform between 50-100 surgeries during our 5 operative days in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. While the surface level impact is that we will give deserving children the opportunity to live their lives with improved cosmetic appearance, the deeper impact is that we will give children the gift of a carefree, confident smile, which is truly life changing. We will improve their ability to eat and speak clearly in many cases as well.
The impact on the children and the gratitude their families share with us is incredible.
We are also fortunate as a group to include the medical staff of the Bolivian hospital in the mission. The U.S. based anesthesia group provides hands on instruction to the Bolivian anesthesia trainees at our hospital site, improving their exposure to pediatric anesthesia techniques, which they generally have limited training in.
I expect to carry forward a sense of gratitude for the advanced technologies and equipment I have access to every day in my job, as well as gratitude for the access to medical care that children at my home institution have. I also have learned how to provide effective and efficient anesthesia care with fewer and different resources than I am accustomed to, which has helped me be a more resilient and resourceful CRNA.
This past week in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, I had the privilege of serving as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist on a medical mission team focused on providing cleft lip and palate repair surgeries. Our dedicated team worked tirelessly to perform life-changing procedures for more than 30 patients, ranging in age from a 2-month-old infant undergoing a cleft lip repair to a 40-year-old receiving their first cleft palate surgery.
The impact of these surgeries was deeply moving. I’ll never forget seeing children light up with joy as they made faces and smiled into a mirror, their clefts repaired for the first time. Mothers, overcome with emotion, wept as they held their children post-surgery, marveling at their transformed appearances. These moments underscored the profound difference that access to surgical care can make in the lives of patients and their families.
Professionally, the trip was also an opportunity for meaningful collaboration. We worked closely with Bolivian anesthesia residents, sharing knowledge and refining pediatric mask induction techniques together. Our discussions on anesthetic management for these unique cases were both educational and rewarding, fostering a sense of shared purpose in providing safe and effective care.
It was an honor to be a part of a mission that allowed these patients to move forward with renewed confidence and opportunities. Our hope for each of them is that their repaired clefts become a part of their past—something they no longer have to think about as they live their lives to the fullest.
This experience reinforced my passion for providing anesthesia care and highlighted the importance of global medical outreach. I’m grateful to have been a part of such an impactful mission and look forward to continuing to make a difference, one patient at a time.
