The city has got its second club foot clinic for treatment of the congenital deformity at Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (GH). This weekly outpatient clinic will function round-the-clock on Tuesdays.
In children born with the deformity, the foot is severely twisted downward and inward making walking difficult or impossible. It can be corrected without surgery using the Ponseti technique and a small procedure — tenotomy.
A clinic is already functioning at Institute of Child Health (ICH), Egmore. The clinics have also been set up at the government hospitals in Thanjavur, Madurai, Coimbatore, Vellore and Dharmapuri.
Two more will come up soon at the government hospitals in Nagercoil and Tuticorin.
Inaugurating the clinic, health minister C. Vijaya Baskar said 659 children have been treated for club foot in Tamil Nadu in the last one year. In the last five years, a total of 1,924 children have been treated.
In India, one out of every 750 children suffers from club foot. In Tamil Nadu, 2,700 children are born with club foot every year, according to doctors.
’24-hour service will help poor parents’The clinic at GH will function from 7.30 a.m. on Tuesday to 7.30 a.m., Wednesday. It will function at the orthopaedic OP till 2 p.m. and at ward 205 of Tower Block-2 for the remaining period.
“Several parents belonging to poorer economic backgrounds have to forego their daily wage when they bring children for treatment. With the clinic open for 24 hours, they can come after work,” N. Deen Mohammed Ismail, director-in-charge, Institute of Orthopaedics, GH said.
The Ponseti method, the alternative to surgery, uses a series of plaster casts over four to six weeks and is followed by tenotomy to correct the tendon in the affected foot. After this, the child should wear foot abduction braces for 23 hours a day for three months, and then during night and while sleeping for three to four years to prevent recurrence.
Santhosh George, director of Cure International, said the club foot treatment programme was going on in 21 States and Tamil Nadu served as a model. He noted that ICH will soon become an institute for imparting training in this technique for doctors in south India, and also for the southern region for Asia.
