Visiting Kabul - Garreth visits our first operating room in Afghanistan.

News

Tue Apr' 24

Kids Operating Room will let nothing stand between us and our mission of providing safe surgery for children.

And this week our co-founder, Garreth Wood, displayed just how committed to this belief we are - by leading a team to visit our operating room in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Children in Afghanistan face a grim reality. One in ever sixteen children here die before reaching their 5th birthday. 13 million children live in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. 14 million live with critical levels of hunger.

Simply put - the country has an enormous gap between its need for children's surgical care, and it's capacity to provide it.

We don't think this is good enough. We believe in a world where every child - no matter where they are - has access to safe, timely surgery.

In 2023, we embarked on one of our most challenging projects to date. To install one of Afghanistan's first ever dedicated paediatric theatres - bringing this life-saving care to millions of children for the first ever time.

And the impact speaks for itself.

Dr. Jawad Irfan, a paediatric surgeon at the hospital told us, "Thanks to KidsOR our situation has greatly improved. We are so happy with the results we get now. Previously, we had huge backlogs. We could only handle around five cases a day. Now, we handle ten to twelve cases per day."

Dr. Jawad Irfan, paediatric surgeon at Ataturk Children's Hospital.

This theatre, our first ever project in Asia, outlines our relentless commitment to safe surgery for every child on the planet. We believe that access to safe surgery is a human right – no matter where you are. Our work won’t be finished until this belief is an absolute right.

We're very grateful to have a co-founder like Garreth - who fights so hard on the front-line for children's right to surgery, every day.