Helen Devos Children's Hospital
Plastic & Craniofacial Surgery

Customized, Innovative Approach

What sets our oral cleft program apart from others starts with our customized approach to treatment, which includes the philosophy of doing as few surgeries as possible, but as many as are needed for each child to correct a cleft lip or palate. Next, we use advanced surgical techniques pioneered by our team in the initial and any follow-up surgeries. The techniques preserve facial function and allow for fewer and less aggressive surgeries than other pediatric plastic surgery programs.

Our innovative surgical approach impacts other areas of your child’s care and outcome:

• Orthodontics: Our patients require less complex orthodontics, which can usually be provided by your local orthodontist, throughout the process. In most cases your son or daughter will not need to wear pre-surgical orthodontics in an attempt to reshape the palate often used by other programs. And he or she will only need another full round of complex orthodontics around 7 to 10 years of age.
• Speech: Our techniques have improved speech outcomes, so we can help your son or daughter achieve perfect, not just understandable, speech.
• Jaw surgery: : A significantly smaller number of our patients compared to other programs around the world need jaw surgery as teenagers to fix cross-bite issues. If jaw surgery is required, there is usually a smaller bite difference our team can correct.

Cleft Lip Repair

Clefts are extremely variable in their anatomic variety: some are narrow, others are wide. Some children have clefts on one side (unilateral), some two sides (bilateral) and some impact the nose (complete cleft) and palate as well as the lip. The greater the width of the cleft creates a larger displacement of muscles and if not repaired properly, can impact facial movement as well as appearance. In these cases we work to restore a normal, healthy operation of your child’s face and appearance through several surgeries in the first two years of life, instead of a single, “one and done” approach. This multi-step physiological approach to repairs continues to deliver outstanding results in both look of nose, lips and face as well as and function for children born with clefts of all sizes and types, so others may never know your child had a cleft lip.

Cleft Palate Repair

The palate, or roof of the mouth, is key for breastfeeding and long-term is essential for talking. A child or adult with a poorly repaired cleft cannot make most sounds correctly and therefore the way they talk can sound very different from normal. Because of the importance of the palate and wanting to restore a cleft palate to normal, healthy function, our team designed the Buccal flap approach which reconstructs the palate by adding tissue from the inside of the cheek like a flap of skin. Surgery to repair a cleft palate is usually done around age 1 the buccal flap approach has proven highly-effective in our patients’ ability to eat and speak clearly.