what we do
Helping kids heal one surgery at a time
Helping kids heal one surgery at a time
Approximately 50 percent of the world’s population lacks access to safe, affordable healthcare.
CURE strives to make healthcare more accessible for children in the eight countries where we serve and remove the financial barriers that often prevent them from receiving the surgical care they desperately need.
Life-Changing Surgery
Every day, CURE clinical teams provide life-changing surgery to children suffering with a wide range of disabilities. We perform three types of surgeries: orthopedic, reconstructive, and neurological.
Orthopedic surgery treats conditions such as bowed legs, clubfoot, genu valgum (knock knees), osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease), windswept legs, and untreated trauma.
Reconstructive surgery treats conditions such as cleft lip, cleft palate, and burn contractures.
Neurological surgery is performed only at our hospital in Uganda and treats conditions such as encephalocele, epilepsy, hydrocephalus, and spina bifida.
Life-Changing Surgery
Comprehensive Care
Seeking surgical care for a life-limiting disability is an exciting but often intense journey. CURE is committed to ensuring that children and families are prepared before, during, and after surgery. This includes a child’s first meeting with a doctor to pre-surgery diagnostic testing and nutritional support.
Once admitted to the hospital, patients and caretakers are provided with lodging and meals at no cost to their families. After surgery, patients are offered prescription medicine, physical therapy, speech therapy, assistive devices, prosthetics and orthotics, as well as follow-up appointments to ensure they are recovering properly and can look forward to the disability-free future they deserve.
Comprehensive Care
Spiritual Ministry and Play Therapy
During a child’s stay at a CURE hospital, the spiritual ministry teams offer spiritual support through biblical counselling and bedside ministry. Caring staff offer comfort and meaningful connection rooted in God’s Word to ease any anxiety patients and their families may be feeling.
All children are also offered play therapy. In CURE’s colourful, interactive playrooms, they enjoy crafts and games, make new friends, share their stories, and explore God’s love for them. Parents and caregivers also receive guidance about supporting their children as they face challenges at home, at school, and in their communities.
Spiritual Ministry and Play Therapy
Community Education and Outreach
The patients CURE serves often live in remote areas, and the distance and/or cost of travel are significant barriers to getting the care they need. Through CURE’s mobile clinics, hospital medical and ministry staff travel to these areas and refer patients to our hospitals for surgery. And through partnerships with local pastors, children with disabilities and their families can receive counselling, encouragement, and the good news of Jesus from trusted Christian leaders.
Because these leaders are pivotal to how communities treat people with disabilities, CURE trains local pastors and church leaders to educate others and undo harmful stigmas. We also partner with local governments, healthcare systems, and schools to help them productively serve children with disabilities in their communities. With a little support, the most vulnerable in society can better access the healthcare they need.
Community Education and Outreach
Training the Next Generation
The areas where CURE serves often lack healthcare training institutions. That’s why every CURE hospital is a teaching centre that equips the next generation of medical workers—training hundreds of local surgeons, doctors, nurses, and anaesthesiologists each year. It’s how we strengthen national healthcare systems in countries where we serve.
CURE’s hospitals are also accredited by the College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa to host residencies and fellowships to train the next generation of surgical specialists. In Uganda, our nationally recognized CURE Neuro Fellowship Program training program draws neurosurgeons from around the world who come to learn a minimally invasive technique to treat spina bifida and hydrocephalus developed by CURE Uganda’s founding Medical Director, Dr. Benjamin Warf.