Between juggling his job as a surgeon at Dream Plastic Surgery Clinic, his responsibilities as a visiting consultant at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) and helping children smile again, Associate Professor Vincent Yeow has little time to himself.
But he is driven to help children born with a cleft lip or palate, where the lip and mouth do not come together properly during foetal development.
Prof Yeow, 54, has been a volunteer in cleft surgical missions overseas since 1994. In 2015, he founded Smile Asia Alliance, a multi-country outfit consisting of seven separate charity organisations.
Its international secretariat is The Smile Mission, a Singapore-based member charity also founded by Prof Yeow, who previously headed KKH’s Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Centre, and the Cleft and Craniofacial Centre.
Ms Phoebe Low, assistant manager of Smile Asia, said a simple 45-minute operation by the organisation to correct cleft conditions “has a huge life-changing impact on the patients“.
Cleft patients often suffer from social stigma due to their appearance and speech difficulties, she said. Those with a cleft palate can suffer complications sometimes resulting in death.
While the condition is rare in Singapore, with less than 0.2% of infants being born with it from 1993 and 2002, some 100,000 Asian children are born with the deformity each year.
Smile Asia conducts surgical missions in the impoverished areas of 13 Asia-Pacific countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Uzbekistan.
The operations are conducted by medical volunteers, including nurses, and assisted by non-medical volunteers from many different countries, including Singapore.
The patients Smile Asia sees usually cannot afford such treatments, while local medical facilities may not always have sufficient resources to intervene.
To fund its operations, Smile Asia works with partners like Mr Bean and the 24 Ritz-Carlton hotels across nine Asia-Pacific countries to sell food products. Apart from fund-raising partnerships, Smile Asia also has 10 student chapters in Singapore that help to raise awareness about the organisation, with initiatives such as concerts and carnivals.
Prof Yeow said: “You have a sense of fulfilment and a satisfaction that is very hard to describe, to be able to provide this service to people who could otherwise not avail themselves to this treatment.”
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Source: The Straits Times, 25 July 2018