What they do
Surgery is the headline. Care is the story.
Operation Smile runs 33 year-round care centres in 18 countries and works with nearly 200 partner hospitals, with more than 6,000 volunteers from 60 countries, most of them from the countries where care is delivered.
Cleft surgery
Lip repair at three to six months, palate repair by eighteen months, and later revisions through adolescence.
Nutrition
Feeding support and nutrition programmes so infants reach a safe weight for anaesthesia.
Oral health
Dentistry and orthodontics, because a cleft reshapes the dental arch for years.
Speech care
Speech therapy after palate repair, the part of recovery nobody sees in the before-and-after photo.
Psychosocial care
Family-centred, culturally aware emotional support. The scar is medical; being looked at is social.
Where this platform picks up
The part the clinic hands off, and nobody catches.
A cleft repair is measured by whether the lip closes. The patient measures whether they want to be photographed. The Skin Ledger works in the gap between those two questions.
Patient stories
Interviewed by Esther, published with consent.
Each story runs in the same shape as every other case file: the person in their own words, the condition explained, what they tried, and what the evidence says about it. Operation Smile's own patient-rights code sets the floor for how the interviews are done.
More stories are being recorded. Each one is published only after the person has read it and said yes.
How consent works here
- Written, informed consent from the patient, or a parent or guardian, before any interview or photograph, with an explanation of exactly how the material will be used.
- The right to withdraw at any time, and to review the published story before it goes live.
- Images that present each person with dignity, never in pain, distress or a vulnerable moment.
- Respect for local traditions and for the wishes of the family, in line with Operation Smile's own patient-rights code.
- Every participant receives something back: a camouflage session, a routine from their analysis, or simply the archive itself.
A surgery costs about as much as a month of serums.
If this site has taught you which products not to buy, here is somewhere for the money to go instead. Tiers follow the breakdown Operation Smile Norway publishes; the button takes you to their own donation page.
Fund a surgery through Operation Smile
Students: this is a club you can start.
Operation Smile Student Programs runs clubs, the International Student Leadership Conference and a peer call for teens born with clefts.
The Skin Ledger is an independent, volunteer-built education project. It is not an official Operation Smile publication, and Operation Smile has not reviewed its medical content. Name and logo use is being confirmed with Operation Smile Norway.