S.O.S Kids Kuching

S.O.S. Kids helps critically sick children and their families to cope with their sickness and hope to create awareness to public with regards to the less fortunate.

As medical care advances, many illnesses that were once considered incurable have now become treatable. This is especially so for a number of serious childhood ailments including major birth defects such as that involving heart, lung and bowels, severe complications of many common childhood illnesses, for example diarrhoea and chest infection and trauma. The availability of intensive care service has helped numerous children survived such life-threatening emergencies. At Sarawak General Hospital, Kuching, about 85% of the total number of children admitted into Paediatric Intensive Care unit survived. Each year approximately 10-15% of the survivors would have major organ damage, particularly in the lungs and brain, after initial recovery. They require continuous medical support and rehabilitation, even when at home, because the recovery process could be very slow and lengthy. The supports and rehabilitation are essential because they would help the survivors attain the best possible eventual recovery; these include appropriate medical devices, adequate nutrition, suitable housing condition, immunization against vaccine-preventable infections and social assistance and moral support.

Unfortunately, the care for the children who survived their critical illness is very costly and stressful. It imposes a great financial burden to, or may even be ill-afford by, some families; which may compromise the quality of care, and consequently, their eventual health. For this reason many parents often have no alternative but to have their child stay in the hospital for months while awaiting the essential supports including housing condition to become available. It also results in considerable disruptions to the affected families’ daily routines and functions. Among many, the family income is the most frequently compromised because one of the parents would have to look after their sick child at the hospital, while the other has to stop work to take care of their other children at home. Unlike many children with specific chronic conditions that could seek help from the existing active voluntary organization e.g. Sarawak Children’s Cancer Society (SCCS) and The Sarawak Thalassaemia Society, there is no such specific support group for the critically sick children in our community yet. Hence, the idea of S.O.S Kids was born with the aim to improve the care of the critically sick children.

Our Aims & Objectives:

  1. To provide moral support and counselling if necessary to the families with critically ill children.
  2. To create public awareness, and disseminate medically sound information to the families, regarding childhood disease.
  3. To provide financial assistance to needy children and their families.
  4. To support the establishment of a conducive and well-equipped half-way house, hospital environment and medical consumables for critically ill children, where appropriate, for the care, treatment and management of critically ill kids.
  5. To support research projects in paediatric critical care medicine and enhance the expertise of medical staff and social workers.

Visit their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/soskidskuchingsarawak/