Children with heart problems all need the same care!

«  MCC does generous and unique work. Through the Veolia Foundation, we can make the company's employees aware of the Association so that, if they want to, they can become "shelter families" for a child who has been operated on. »

Jérôme Contamine

When a child is the victim of a serious heart malformation, it will always be a crisis but it also becomes a struggle for the parents: life must be organised around the sick child, access to adequate care must be arranged, sometimes a heart replacement must be awaited. In developed countries, these are serious burdens for families to bear; but in developing countries, there is no affordable solution for the vast majority of tiny patients.
 

A system of solidarity

Thousands of children around the world, totalling 0.8% of live births, have malformed hearts.

To fight this fate, Professor Francine Leca, a specialist in heart surgery at the Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris, established the Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiaque - Enfants du Monde Association in 1996. With the firm determination to achieve care for children from the four corners of the world, the Association set up a whole system that makes it possible to virtually halve the cost of care for a child.
For example, certain logistics partners such as Aviation Without Borders (Aviation sans frontières) and Mondial Assistance give tiny patients free transport to Paris. Thereafter, supportive volunteer families — numbering around 200 at present — provide home and shelter to the child when it leaves hospital after its operation and they take responsibility for the expenses of its convalescence for a period of six to eight weeks. As a result, the budget to care for one child is "reduced" to the cost of hospitalisation, which is around €7,000.
Since 1997, MCC has succeeded in caring for more than 750 children from 42 countries. Following other major donors such as Air France, Thomson and Sanofi-Synthélabo, the Veolia foundation granted €100,000 over two years, enabling 14 children to have heart operations.