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After the end of a long busy day as I sat to look at some videos, I got a call from Dr Reshma. She informed me that a child who is taking treatment at our centre needed an urgent appendicectomy – removal of his appendix which had become infected and inflamed. It was a Saturday night. The patient had travelled from a place 200km away from Bangalore and reached a prominent Government Hospital in Bangalore for the urgent surgery. However, there was no surgeon available at the hospital.

When I walked up the stairs of Samraksha today I realised that a little girl was peeping down from the stairs. The look in her eyes told me that she was waiting for me. I shared the usual pleasantries with the family and walked across a hall full of children and parents straight to the doctor's room. We had a meeting scheduled for the day and soon I found myself with 2 of my friends in a room discussing the future roadmaps.

As little children, we all looked forward eagerly to the summer holidays. For the team at Project Samraksha and the school-going children who come for treatment there, the anticipation for the summer holidays is just the same, however for a different reason. We plan to make use of every holiday season to give deferoxamine infusion to the children who are not responding sufficiently to oral chelators. Deferoxamine infusion can be very effective in controlling iron levels in the body.

Dear Editor,

It was interesting to go through the Sankalp Patrika and also noted the varoius studies made in the treatment of thalassemia children.

Did read about the mention of the institute.

I am happy to state that I have appointed a doctor to look after all thalassemia children.

April is a busy month at Sankalp. It is time to review the work done in last year, compile reports, share feedbacks and plan for the time to come. It's the time when the gaps from the past year tend to share the mind space with the resolve to achieve the targets for the year to come.

Sankalp has been involved in thalassemia management for last 3 years. What started as an initiative with very little prior experience and knowledge has blossomed into a comprehensive thalassemia management and care program. In the last three years we have benchmarked our performance with our won prior results and using the Thalassemia international Federation's guidelines for clinical management as the gold standard to compare against. Centres supported by us have indeed shown vast improvement in the quality of care being given to the thalassemia patients.