Save a Child’s Heart

Every 29 hours a desperately ill child from a developing country is saved in the pediatric cardiac surgical unit of the Save a Child's Heart medical facilities in Israel or during one of our medical missions to a developing country. Thousands of children from poor families around the world are alive today because of a small group of medical professionals who volunteer their time and expertise to perform cardiac surgery and train medical personnel. SACH saves children with congenital heart defects who have almost no chance of surviving to adulthood in their native countries, and saves their lives with no political, cultural, religious, or racial preference whatsoever. Based in Israel, our mission is to improve the quality of pediatric cardiac care for children from countries where the heart surgery they need is unobtainable. Save A Child's Heart also works to multiply the effectiveness of its resources outside of Israel by training medical personnel from developing countries. The ultimate goal of SACH is actually to create "Centers of Competence" around the world, which will enable local medical personnel to provide these life saving services on their own. This is a full outreach training program that brings doctors and nurses to the SACH center for in-depth, post graduate training; it also sends staff overseas to provide this education to local medical professionals, as well as to perform surgeries side-by-side with them. Until our ultimate goal is achieved, children with congenital heart defects will continue to be brought to Israel for surgery and other cardiac care. More than 3400 children have already been saved directly by SACH personnel, while thousands more are receiving the life-saving treatments they need from local personnel who were previously trained by SACH. We have trained Tanzania’s first pediatric cardiac surgeon, and we are in the process of training Ethiopia’s first pediatric cardiac surgeon.