Help Children's HeartLink on Give to the Max Day!

One in 120 children worldwide is born with a congenital heart defect. For those children born with a congenital heart defect who do not die within the first months or years of life, living with heart disease will make them susceptible to infection and likely too ill to play, attend school or help support the family. In turn, caring for a critically ill child often cripples a family's ability to function effectively as an economic and social unit, driving them deeply into poverty.

In the United States and other developed countries, children with congenital heart disease are commonly identified through prenatal diagnostics and receive treatment and follow-up within days of birth. However, in lesser developed countries as a whole, the facilities, funding and expertise do not exist to the degree necessary to provide all affected children with the treatment they need.

Children's HeartLink is addressing this crisis by supporting the further development and improvement of pediatric cardiac programs in some of the world's most populous and underserved countries. Their programs are focused on helping pediatric cardiac programs in the developing world become sustainable centers of excellence so that our vision of children the world over having ready access to quality cardiac care can be achieved.

What makes the work of Children's HeartLink unique is both its focus on building local capacity in developing countries - they seek out hospitals with the potential to start a transformative change in the delivery of pediatric cardiac care and work with them to develop their skill set so that they can become a regional center of excellence - and their view of their work as medical diplomacy. They believe that the expertise we have developed in medical care can and should be used as a means of support and help to the rest of the world. Not only does it help alleviate suffering and save lives, it allows people the world over to be touched by and see the capacity we have for imparting positive, lasting change.