This year’s Take Heart Mercy Mission was another great achievement, made all the more successful thanks to your kind generosity, which allowed us to ship over £500,000 worth of urgently needed medical equipment to the Karapitaya Hospital, in time for the Take Heart team to use on site.

The dedicated volunteer doctors, and support staff, from the Evalina Children’s’ Hospital, arrived in Galle a fortnight ago and began assessing children less than 24 hours after landing.

The first two surgeries were performed that very day and the team kept up an impressive pace, working 15 hour days for the entirety of the mission, and averaging three operations per day, of which we are delighted to reveal that all bar one of the young patients survived, and are now recovering well at the Karapitaya.

Following the completion of the mission, last week, Chairman Paul Scally was extremely touched to receive the following note from Doctor Mangala Goonetilleke, Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist at the Karapitaya Hospital who wrote, “This is a small note of gratitude to the whole team for your great and dedicated work here in Karapitiya. This mission not only helped to save the lives of children with complex heart diseases but was also a good educational exercise to our team. We all learned many things from this team which will definitely help us to improve the patient care.

“The equipment and other materials donated by you are of immense help to our unit to improve the patient care. Therefore this is a big Thank You note to you and your team for your great work. Keep it up.” We would like to echo Dr Mangala’s sentiments and thank all the charity’s supporters that have kindly donated towards making this year’s mission such a success.