Our 2020 Goals

Our 2020 goals focus primarily on improving clinical care for children with blood diseases in Sri Lanka and India (Kolkata).

Hemoglobal’s support of clinical care in Kolkata has started with five priorities targeted for the year 2020. All our priorities relate to the overall goal of extension of survival or cure of children with blood diseases. These goals are derived from our experience in Sri Lanka, which is still a focus of Hemoglobal because help is still desperately needed there.

Drawing upon its experience in Sri Lanka, Hemoglobal seeks to support five priorities in Kolkata by the year 2020:

1. Improving day-to-day care: Support for a Comprehensive Clinic (working in parallel and complementary to the government hospital clinics) including support to by nurses, counselors and data managers whose efforts will be directed to improving access to treatment particularly to children living in rural areas;

2. Aiming for cure: Support for the training of individuals in expertise in stem cell (bone marrow) transplantation within the program currently being established in Kolkata;

3. Making blood safe: A blood transfusion is required by almost all these children sometime in their clinical course. We aim to support safe blood transfusions (among other approaches, providing blood that is appropriately tested for viruses, irradiated, and phenotyped);

4. Measuring how well treatment is working: We aim to implement Ferriscan®-based assessment of iron overload in all children receiving chronic transfusions. As in Sri Lanka in 2009, we hope to establish Ferriscan in Kolkata by 2016. By 2020, we hope to have the critical modality of Ferriscan®-based monitoring available to 200 patients a year.

5. Improving a child’s life, one day at a time: These children have been temporarily derailed from their life’s happiness, but the child’s disease is not the child. Hemoglobal aims to provide resources to help these children including through nutritional support and development of skills, social clubs and day camps.