Yesterday afternoon, on board Nave Vulcano and in the presence of civil and military authorities and the Undersecretary of State for Defense Honorable Matteo Perego di Cremnago, the signing of the collaboration agreement between the General Secretariat of Defense and the National Directorate of Armaments and the Smile House Foundation Third Sector Body.
The naval unit, moored in the port of Ancona, also hosted an operating session in the morning, during which a 6-month-old baby of Pakistani origin was operated on with a maxillofacial malformation, known as cleft lip.
The operation was performed by the team of Dr. Domenico Scopelliti, vice president of the Foundation, in the operating room of Nave Vulcano, a logistics support unit of the Navy with role 2 capacity or able to perform surgical interventions and equipped with all modern diagnostic medical equipment.
The collaboration of the Navy with the Foundation starts from afar: on the occasion of the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 when the aircraft carrier Cavour, in its first operational activity, sailed from Italy to the Caribbean island to bring humanitarian aid and health assistance. On that occasion, a team of volunteers from Operation Smile joined the crew, performing 35 surgeries on board. Subsequently, in 2013 the first collaboration agreement was signed and the 30th Naval Group “Il Sistema Paese in Movimento” hosted on the aircraft carrier Cavour a team of the Foundation that operated on 114 patients from Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, Ghana and Algeria.
The collaboration then continued with the project “Un Mare di Sorrisi”, through which the Navy made available, when not used for the priority tasks of the institute, the ship Cavour and its health area, which has become the scenario of many “clinical weekends” organized in Italy and in which numerous patients have been visited and operated. In addition, in 2021 the multidisciplinary Smile House clinic was inaugurated at the Navy Military Hospital Center in Taranto.
“The signing of this important agreement – said the Honorable Matteo Perego di Cremnago, at the end of the activity on the ship Vulcano – is the strong signal that military health can make its means available for social purposes and for the support of the weakest and most fragile, who can not and must never be left behind”. Vulcano ship currently engaged in Operation Safe Mediterranean (WHO) received the combat flag during the Navy Day held in La Spezia on June 9th.
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