By T. K. Ng | Adminstration Officer
Counselling Service
This service is designed for couples having unborn cleft lip and palate babies, as well as the parents and patients of different ages who need surgeries and treatments.
For Couples Having Unborn Affected Babies: With the advance technology nowadays, it can confirm if a pregnant woman is having a cleft lip and palate baby during an antenatal check-up around 20 weeks pregnancy. When couples learn that their baby is affected by clefts, they may instantly feel very anxious and worried. They may want to visit our centre as soon as possible so that they can get more information about congenital deformity, care-taking & treatment services.
For Parents & Patients of Different Ages: The treatment of cleft lip and palate is a bit complicated and involves several specialties and there are two phases of treatment, from birth to adulthood. For primary treatment, cleft lip repair will be arranged between 3-6 months and cleft palate repair will be arranged around 1 year of age. For secondary treatment, the adult patients may require orthognathic surgery and combined lip and nose reconstructive surgery. Therefore, they may have queries about the surgeries and which of the surgical specialty is the most appropriate one to choose.
The parents and patients may make appointments to see our person in charge personally to seek for more information, our services and support.
Lip Scar Massage Workshop
After cleft lip repair, a scar will form. The scar formation pulls the edges of the skin together, causing a tight area of skin. Moreover, the decrease in the size of the skin can affect the muscles and tendons, causing a decrease in movement. Scar massaging is definitely beneficial to the patients in several aspects, such as eliminating itching of the scar, softening the scar and soft tissue around it, relieving stiffness of scar tissue, preventing the build-up of this excess tissue and leaves the skin feeling suppler, stimulating the blood circulation and helps to speed up normal change in order to improve flexibility, allowing the skin to feel less rigid, reducing redness and swelling, helping the skin to appear with less aggravation, as well as constructing a flattened appearance.
As lip scar massaging gives magical result to the cleft babies after surgical lip repair, HKACLP holds regular Lip Scar Message Workshopsprovidingguidance and caring items to help the parents to give appropriate regular messaging to their cleft babies.
Veteran Parents’ Sharing on Selection of Cleft Treatment
Cleft Lip and Palate is a very common but most curable congenital orofacial anomalies. The patients need to receive two or three surgeries as a whole in different stage of growth before they can recover.
The first treatment to a cleft lip and palate baby is surgical repair of cleft lip which it is definitely not simply closing the gap of the upper lip by stitches, otherwise, the patient may have obvious facial difference such asymmetric lip and nose that will make the patients feel inferior and they may also susceptible to bully. Cleft lip and palate patients need quality surgeries from plastic and reconstructive surgeons who are apt to reconstruct lip and nose so as to improve its functioning and aesthetic results. Quality lip repair gives a cleft kid a normal face and make them no different from any other children.
Likewise, surgical repair of cleft palate is very important too. If an affected child has his cleft palate repaired badly & heavily, then he may have serious speech problem. Moreover, the multiple scares on his palate may tremendously hinder the growth of his upper jaw that consequently results in serious underbite problem which necessitates him to go for double/triple jaw surgery upon puberty. On the contrary, if the child receive one-off quality palate repair, then he may have perfect speech with very few scare on the palate. Then, when he grows up, he may have mild underbite problem that can simply be corrected through orthodontic treatment.
Therefore, the parents of newborn cleft babies should know how to choose treatment service. They must clearly understand the surgical outcomes and treatment details of different surgical specialties before selecting treatment services for their cleft children. HKACLP holds regularly sharing workshops whereby the veteran parents will share their experience and help the parents of new born babies to select appropriate treatment services.
Links:
By Mr. Chan | Fund Raising Officer
By Chan | Fund Raising Officer
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
