A team of six medical specialists from Interplast Australia are in Mt Hagen conducting surgeries on patients with deformed body parts.
Over a hundred patients have come to see the team, but due to time factor, only thirty of them underwent a successful operation.
This is their 107th time to provide surgical services in Papua New Guinea.
The Interplast team led by team leader, Dr Mark Strahan, visited their surgical patients this morning at Mt Hagen General Hospital.
Many of the patients who came for the operation were from other parts of the Highlands Region.
A total of thirty patients, mostly children, who had cleft palates and burns on their body, underwent surgery.
Some of the patients told EMTV News that they had waited for two to three years for the Interplast team to visit PNG again, so that they could come to the hospital.
Interplast Australia is a non-profit organization based in Melbourne.
Interplast sends out volunteers who are mostly surgeons and other specialists’ doctors to Asia Pacific regions to provide plastic and reconstructive surgeries, as well as building the capacity of local medical systems through their training and mentoring programs by training local surgeons.
Their mission is to ‘repair bodies and rebuild lives’.
They do this through providing surgical services to those who cannot afford to, or have little to no access to quality surgical services. Those who came to Mt Hagen were two surgeons, two anaesthetists, two nurses and a local surgeon, Dr Akule Dunlop, who is currently trained under them.
The team will leave this weekend for Australia.
The last time they came to Mt Hagen was in 2012, when they saw 200 patients and have operated only on a few.
This year they saw more than a hundred patients, but operated only 30 patients, due to limited time.
