UNAIR NEWS – Working as a volunteer has been the life of Dr. Irwanto, dr., Sp.A (K). He has been moved to volunteer in other country.
In February 2017, Doctor Irwanto went for hundreds of kilometers to meet the boys with cleft lips in Myanmar. He volunteered in other countries to help the suffering boys there.
He decided to accept the offer to volunteer in a cleft lip community service activities funded by Smile Asia and the Kanbawza’s Bright Future Myanmar Foundation (BFM).
Doctor Irwanto is the only pediatrician from Indonesia who joined the foundation that handles children with cleft lip. Together with 30 other medical personnel, Doctor Irwanto joined nurses, surgeons, anesthesiologists from countries such as America, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and the Philippines.
For a week there, they held a community service activity, performing a surgery for 85 children with cleft lip in Women and Children’s Special Hospital in Taunggyi, Shan State, Myanmar. Pediatric patients with cleft lip are from hundreds of ethnic groups, such as Shan, Pao, Kayah, Kayan, Larhu, Danu, Palaung, Kachin and Bamar.
As the only pediatrician there, Irwanto is in charge of preparing the patient’s physical condition such as determining patients who are eligible for surgery, as well as responsible for postoperative treatment process.
“At first there were more than 100 children listed, but after screening, there were only 85 children ready for surgery,” he said.
According to him, not all cleft lip patients are ready for surgery at that time. There were a number of children whose hemoglobin conditions are inadequate or in sick conditions.
The number of cleft lip prevalence in Myanmar was higher than in Indonesia. Cleft lip cases occur to every 800 or 1,000 births. In Indonesia, based on Basic Health Research data of 2013, the prevalence of cleft lip cases on children aged 24-59 months is 0.08 percent of 0.53 percent of children with congenital abnormalities in Indonesia.
Besides in Myanmar, doctor Irwanto has other experience when volunteering in Japan in 2013. At that time, the man who was born on February 27, 1967 in cooperation with the University of Kobe held earthquake victims handling for children with disabilities.
Being a volunteer had given him a lot of valuable experience. One of the most memorable among them is to maintain teamwork and morale during handling dozens of patients in a matter of days.
“The way they work impressed me,” he said.
The Global Travel Award recipient by Bill and Melinda Gates in 2015 will even go through the days of volunteering in India in December 2017.
“That means our competence as an Indonesian doctor is recognized by other countries. This is not an easy thing, because there are strict qualification, ” said the best graduates of UNAIR in 2013.
Author: Sefya H. Istighfarica
Editor: Defrina Sukma S
