 Welcome to Kiribati and welcome to Kiribati in the series of profiles who look at some of the important aspects of the Australian Development Programme in Kiribati. The Kiribati government said to us that the particular priorities they were like Australia's involvement in, first of all basic education. This should be followed up by TVET, technical vocational education and training. Work for skills development. We look at also economic development and business development and more recently we've been asked to concentrate on infrastructure. But there are also other areas where Australia has played an effective and historic role, for example in health. With a population the size of Wollongong, our tiny country will have great difficulty in providing all the capacity required to service all health needs of our people. And every year, under the umbrella of the Pacific Island project, teams of medical professionals arrive from Australia to assist. The Royal Australian College of Surgeons has really eminent people who volunteer their time and their costs for coming up here are provided by Defence from Australian aid. This team of plastic surgeons and their support are from Interplast. Interplast is an Australian based not-for-profit organisation. We send teams of plastic and reconstructive surgeons around the Asia Pacific region to provide surgeries but also to train up local medical personnel. Over the past four months, the Hospital Administration, together with the Australian High Commission, has spread the word of the team's visit. So there's no time to waste and it's downstairs to begin assessing the more than 120 people who have come from all over Kiribati for treatment. It has an enormous impact on people's lives here. It changes lives, particularly where there are serious social impediments, for example, disfigurements. When these things are mediated by their surgery, the life of the person is really turned around. A high proportion of the patients are babies with cleft lip and cleft palate conditions. Some years ago, Nekawa had a bad encounter with a part of boiling water. Both hands were severely burned. During their last visit, the team did some initial work. Her right hand is almost back to normal but there's a need for more work on the still badly disfigured left hand. So we've brought all this equipment with us from Australia, so we're able to do our operations and we're just going through the boxes at the moment, making sure everything's here so we can start operating tomorrow. It's been busy and demanding and we've had very interesting case mix of cases from babies to adults with big tumours. Lovely, lovely repair to do. We'll get it back pretty well to normal. Some very challenging, some we won't be able to treat here. Others will have to refer to other specialists, but by and large we can handle most of it and it's going to be a very busy two weeks of operating because nearly every patient that has come in will need a procedure. Thank you. Very important. So this is a three year old boy and he has a cyst on the top of his head that we're going to take out for him. So because he's three years old he can't have that done in the clinic because it wouldn't tolerate having local anesthetic. So he's having a general anesthetic. Even though the facilities here are relatively basic it in fact is the skill of the team that makes it possible to operate here. And by us all working together we can actually achieve quite advanced surgery. He just needs forward planning and helping to train the staff here to continue to care for the children after they've been treated here. And the date of operation, please. Morning, hello. She was done yesterday. Can I say this? Very good. The first time I came to Kiribati was in 1991. I just felt at home straight away when I came here and so I kept coming back. It's just that there are so many more people now and the hospital is no bigger than it was 20 years ago but it's just got to deal with twice as many patients and it really showed. It's pretty good too. Yeah, it looks good. See yesterdays? Very good. He can go home. He's a boy and he's pretty frisky. So the mother has to keep him quiet at home. No running around. And I know what boys are like because I have four of them. They never do what they should do. Thank you. See you Friday. Aye. You want to come in? Come on. Yeah, she's okay. Nekawa had surgery on her burned hand just after the team arrived and now six days later she's returned for further treatment. This child had a very bad burn contracture and we put in a number of grafts and released the fingers and all the grafts have taken very well. This is just a week ago so we're just doing a dressing change and now the child will have a functioning hand. The good thing about children is that they like rubber and you can release their contractures and they come out nicely. Yes, we've had lots of these this trip. Yeah, we've had probably half a dozen of different types of severe burns that weren't well managed primarily so the wounds have healed and we've been called by secondary intention and all the fingers have fused together and we've released it all and now we've got that. But if they had proper primary care, of course, you wouldn't need to do the secondary surgery and the results would be much better. We saw nearly 170 patients and we've operated on well over 100 and most of them were babies and a fantastic case mix of cases both adults and children and we've done some big surgery and some very rewarding. We're doing the dressings today so we're very happy. We're all happy mums and dads with their babies repaired lips.