The hospital is now encouraging parents and doctors to donate used clubfoot braces to the Brace Bank
Bai Jerbai Wadia Hospital for Children, Parel, Mumbai started India’s first Brace Bank W-riddhi. The hospital is now encouraging parents and doctors to donate used clubfoot braces to the Brace Bank, where they are refurbished and supplied to needy families at a very low cost of Rs 1,500 per child every month under the “Each one treat one scheme”. Clubfoot is the most common musculoskeletal birth deformity affecting about one in 800 children.
Wadia Hospital partnered with CURE Clubfoot Worldwide in 2011, a US-based NGO to establish a dedicated Clubfoot Clinic in the hospital premises to provide a protocol-based clubfoot treatment by training doctors in the Ponseti method, providing free clubfoot braces, establishing a prospective clubfoot registry, and setting a 24×7 dedicated clubfoot helpline for parent support. Now, it is taken a step ahead and established India’s first Brace Bank W-riddhi meaning progress.
Dr Rujuta Mehta HOD, Dept Paediatric Orthopaedics, Bai Jerbai Wadia Hospital for Children, said, “Rather than depending on NGOs for support, we are now encouraging parents and doctors to donate used clubfoot braces to the Brace Bank, where they are refurbished and supplied to needy families at a very low cost under the “Each one treat one scheme”. Our vast database of over 1500 patients is uploaded in-house by Wadia staff on a special online portal of the International Clubfoot Registry (ICR), hosted by the University of Iowa, USA. We are collaborating with international universities (University of Toronto and University of Oxford) for various research projects related to developing outcome tools and treatment guidelines for late presenting clubfoot.”
“Over the past 10 years, we have treated over 1500 children with clubfeet, making it one of the largest clubfoot treatment centres in India. Besides idiopathic clubfeet, we have developed special expertise in treating syndromic clubfeet, atypical clubfeet, and children who present with untreated clubfoot after the walking age. The aim is to provide uninterrupted treatment with the introduction of clubfoot braces at an affordable cost,” concluded Dr Minnie Bodhanwala, CEO, Wadia Hospital.
