How an Oxford social idea is helping children to walk

Clubfoot can be a debilitating condition that can lead to lifelong disability that many children in developing countries suffer from, despite it being easily treated. Meet the Oxford team who are changing that for the better.

Written by Philippa Christoforou, Licensing and Ventures Manager, Oxford University Innovation

Every year around 200,000 children are born with clubfoot.

For those of them lucky enough to be born with access to decent healthcare, clubfoot is an easily treatable condition that will have no impact in their later life. For the majority who are instead born in developing countries and consequently fail to receive treatment, the condition becomes ‘neglected clubfoot’ which is a painful and severely disabling deformity.

Many of these children also suffer emotional pain, being separated from other children, unable to play games and participate in social activities. Very often they end up not going to school, miss out on training or skills to enable them to work. It is a very hard life for these children. No child should have to suffer so much, especially when effective treatment is readily available to transform their life.

It was this problem that Professor Chris Lavy brought two years ago to myself and my colleague Sarah Deakin at Oxford University Innovation. Chris asked us to help him run a crowdfunding campaign on OxReach, Oxford’s social impact crowdfunding platform which exists to support and develop projects within the University which can make a transformative and positive effect on society.

Running a crowdfunding campaign requires a huge amount of work — planning the campaign, designing all the media materials to promote it, actually running it over a month-plus with tireless days and sleepless nights attracting potential donations to the campaign — but we are passionate about helping the Oxford community make a difference.

Despite the daunting prospect of crowdfunding, Chris and his colleague Grace were unfazed. To them, the potential benefit of the campaign outweighed the time and effort required. They were aiming to train health workers across Africa to treat children with clubfoot. Their goal was to transform lives. We jumped at the chance to help them.

The proposal was beautifully simple: the Ponseti method is a low cost, low risk method of treating clubfoot. It involved serial manipulation, division of a small tendon under local anaesthetic, plaster casts and fixed shoes to be worn at night. It works in up to 95% of cases. Chris and Grace wanted to raise £100,000 to train a group of trainers who would then spread the knowledge and method across Africa. They would also run courses directly for health workers, so that they would recognise clubfoot at an early age and have the skills to be able to treat it.

In November 2016, we helped Chris and Grace run a four-week crowdfunding campaign on OxReach, which raised almost £90,000 from 300 people.

Those 300 people have helped the team to run two clubfoot instructor training courses and to translate teaching materials into French and Portuguese. The most recent course, held in April 2018 trained 20 local healthcare workers in providing clubfoot treatment, and 18 new trainers/mentors from clubfoot programmes in Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Rwanda, Benin, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Zambia, Malawi, Nicaragua and Burundi. During this course they treated 39 patients. They then returned to share their knowledge with countless other healthcare workers in these 12 countries.

Each one of these individuals is now making a dramatic difference to children across Africa. They are giving children born with clubfoot the opportunity to run, jump and play — and that is thanks to Chris, Grace, and everyone who supported their idea.

Professor Chris Lavy and Grace Le are based in the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology, and Musculoskeletal Sciences (NDORMS). They focus on research, teaching and training to strengthen surgical care and training capacity in Africa.

Philippa is one of a cross-OUI team looking to develop Oxford ideas into social enterprises which put social or environmental good at the core of what they do. To find out more, visit: https://innovation.ox.ac.uk/university-members/social-enterprise/. For more from Oxford University Innovation, follow us on Medium, Twitter and LinkedIn.