A Galway-based plastic surgery team is to travel to Albania with vital medical equipment for two weeks of intensive operating.
The team, led by consultant plastic surgeon Jack McCann, hopes to treat up to 50 patients, many of whom will be children, with congenital malformations, burns, scars and post-traumatic injuries.
The trip, which is being organised by newly founded charity Friends of Albania Ltd, is expected to cost about €50,000. Team members are all volunteering their time and expertise to the Mother Teresa Hospital in the capital, Tirana.
The 14-strong team includes Mr McCann and consultant plastic surgeon Jenny Lynch; consultant anaesthetists Dermot Lowe and Eugene O'Kelly, nine nurses and a member of staff from the sterilising department of University College Hospital Galway.
Mr McCann's wife, Moya, will also travel to Tirana with the team on April 9th to help out at a hostel for homeless children.
Mr and Mrs McCann visited Albania on a fact-finding mission in December where they found that local hospital facilities were very primitive.
Mr McCann, who works at UCHG and the Bons Secours Hospital in Galway, said: "A few years ago, one of my interns who worked with the Children First Foundation, an Australian organisation, asked if I would look after a four-year-old Albanian child who was very badly burned. She was quite sick and had undergone different types of surgery over there for four months but had not improved and was going downhill.
"We brought the child to UCHG and the Western Health Board gave us permission to operate on her. We kept her here for three to four months and sent her back fully healed. I saw her again when I was out there in December and she is doing well, but we need to do a little bit of tidy-up work on her."
A number of other children, who were brought over from Albania to be operated on for congenital deformities in Galway since then, will also be followed up by the team.
"There are about 15 to 20 children who need surgery waiting for us and there are lots of others that we know of who will need work done.
"We will be working with the professor of plastic surgery at the hospital, but his unit is very basic and very poorly equipped. A lot of the equipment there, even basic suction equipment, is very old or not working," said Mr McCann.
