Many Reasons to Smile
We create smiles in three ways: by providing cleft lip and palate treatment, comprehensive dental care and individualized pediatric rehabilitation programs. These lasting legacies ensure that children receive the care they need to live happy, hopeful lives.
Cleft Lip & Palate Treatment
Complete treatment for a cleft lip and palate often requires more than just the initial surgery. A child may also require additional operations, braces, dental implants, speech therapy, nutritional education and psychological counseling. Sharing Smiles assembles, trains and equips a highly-skilled multidisciplinary team to evaluate, diagnose and plan the best treatment for each patient using local talent and local resources.
Each medical mission strengthens our relationships with our in-country health care teams and the generous partners who make these trips possible.
Dentistry
The development of a child’s smile is part of the experience of life. Parents celebrate when their baby’s first teeth appear, and years later when they fall out, as major milestones.
But for some children, their smiles are at risk because they do not have the ability to properly care for their teeth.
Sharing Smiles provides free, year-round, preventative and restorative dental care to children in orphanages and other communities in need, to ensure that these children’s smiles have the healthy foundation to last a lifetime.
Pediatric Rehabilitation
Some families are unable to care for a child born with a mental or physical disability in their own home.
Sharing Smiles sends expert teams of physical, occupational and speech therapists on-site to assess these children. We partner with the local network of caregivers and make certain each child receives a personal evaluation and customized treatment plan. Together, we provide the therapy these children need to achieve increased mobility, function and communication skills to help make them self-sufficient.