I plan to travel to Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia as part of a team aimed at providing subspecialty surgical care to patients suffering from cleft deformities and other congenital conditions. The mission will be February 11-28, 2026. I will be providing anesthesia for these surgeries. This mission is a longstanding arrangement between the Milwaukee Medical Mission and local stakeholders, in place in 1986. Surgeries performed include cleft lip/palate corrections, finger/toe separations, prosthetic eye placement, facial/ear reconstruction, and cranial defect repair, among others.
Patients served include mostly children (and some adults) from northern Colombia suffering from a variety of congenital malformations. The Milwaukee Medical Mission has been working in this region for many years, and the pipeline of patients from various areas to care access is well-established. This population, without the interventions provided by the mission, has limited access to the subspecialty care that will be provided.
We expect to run multiple operating rooms in parallel for the duration of our 17 day mission. Patients with the conditions we will treat are identified over the course of the year and scheduled for operations during our time in country.
On a more personal level, this mission will be my first time providing anesthesia abroad. It will be a formative experience for me which will inform my long-term career goals of providing care in underserved settings around the world. Specifically, my long-term goal is to establish a similar arrangement alongside my wife (a pediatric neurologist) in her home country of Bolivia. The work we do in Colombia with a well-established foundation will be enlightening in the pursuit of breaking ground in other underserved areas.
We had a successful mission, providing 69 operations over 2 weeks. The intervention was generally focused on cleft repair, syndactyly, and microtia repair.
