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Hamas-Israel conflict won’t deter Chain of Hope

Published:Tuesday | December 26, 2023 | 12:07 AMChristopher Serju/Senior Gleaner Writer
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Dr Gavin Wright (left), chairman of Chain of Hope, has his heart checked by six-year-old Oneila Dunn, a past beneficiary of the charity, as it celebrates its 20th year of cardiac care to Bustamante Children’s Hospital in St Andrew. Wright was the anaesth
Gladstone Taylor/Multimedia Photo Editor
Dr Gavin Wright (left), chairman of Chain of Hope, has his heart checked by six-year-old Oneila Dunn, a past beneficiary of the charity, as it celebrates its 20th year of cardiac care to Bustamante Children’s Hospital in St Andrew. Wright was the anaesthetist for Oneila’s surgery when she was four months old.
Chain of Hope UK Executive Director Emma Scanlan speaking to The Gleaner recently.
Gladstone Taylor/Mutimedia Photo Editor
Chain of Hope UK Executive Director Emma Scanlan speaking to The Gleaner recently.
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The ongoing militarised conflict between Hamas and Israel has set back a planned mission by Chain of Hope UK to bring relief to children in urgent need of heart surgery in the war-torn Middle East. But Executive Director Emma Scanlan has vowed that the charity will not be deterred in its efforts.

“We’ve just been asked by the Palestinian Relief Fund to take them to help some kids that are based in Gaza, and a mission was due to go there before the war. The war happened and the kids didn’t get operated on, and now we need to bring them out. So we are going to bring them out into our heart centre that we have set up in Egypt,” she told The Gleaner.

The institution, which was set up in Aswan in southern Egypt, is modelled off the various cardiac institutions set up by Chain of Hope UK across the world to serve children in underdeveloped territories.

Neglected region

“We set up the hospital in a neglected region, so all the services were in Cairo (Egypt’s capital) and you’ve got a population of about 100 million, so it’s very different from Jamaica. The heart centre started modestly in the early days doing missions like this. Eventually, it grew through donations locally, through the local charity, and they now treat over 3,000 patients a year,” Scanlan added.

“So we are going to take children from Gaza to the hospital in Aswan. We regularly bring children there from Yemen, Iraq and from African countries. So we encourage countries, also, not to only take care of your own populations. It’s good to do that, but you need also to cater to children from outside. In fact, we have, in the past, flown children to Bustamante Hospital for Children from Trinidad and Grenada,” said the executive director.

Chain of Hope UK’s plans for the region include the establishment of a paediatric cardiac hub for the English-speaking Caribbean in Jamaica to facilitate the expansion of services, to include treatment of children from islands such as Grenada, which has a population of about 100,000. For this reason, it does not warrant the setting up of an entire paediatric cardiac programme.

“The original vision was to see Jamaica as a hub. We have a long way to go to get to that, and everyone wants to help the Jamaican children first, but I think we should not forget humanity,” Scanlan said.

“It’s very important to keep that aim going, to bring in children from other islands. That’s what we’d like to do,” she told The Gleaner.

christopher.serju@gleanerjm.com