Since the year 2006, Heevie organization, and in coordination with the Italian hospitals, centers and organizations, is performing a regular program for providing the necessary medical assistance and treatment for children with various diseases and organ malformations through the surgical intervention and other treatment and management modalities.

The treated cases involved children with congenital heart diseases, renal and genital systems malformations, malignancies, blood disorders and others.

When the program started, Heevie organization, by the support of the KRI government and in coordination with the Italian partners, Heevie sent hundreds of children with various medical and surgical problems to Italy to be treated both medically and surgically according to the need. After establishment of the local health infrastructure in a way being ready to support the program activities, specialized Italian teams started to visit KRI according to a regular schedule, usually, a minimum of 4 missions/ year were performed during which more than 200 operations were done (50 operations per each mission).

The last crises and security instability in Iraq made the Italian teams unable to visit the country; as a solution for that and instead, Heevie used to collect the most acute patients and send them to Italy for operations. Total number of patients underwent surgical interventions in Italy during the year 2018 are 17 patients. Efforts are ongoing by Heevie to resume the program in Iraq through regulating new missions for the Italian teams.

While implementing the project, Heevie got benefit from the specialized Italian teams during their regular visits to the region to do capacity building for the local staff involving them in the overall all steps of the program and management steps and procedures. This involved training the staff on preparation of the patients for the surgical operations, post operative follow up and care, ICU monitoring, treatment of complications and performing various medical and surgical procedures. The program also involved training of the doctors (mainly pediatricians) on Echocardiography examination for the patients with congenital heart diseases in Italy.

The project of treating patients and training the local medical staff was implemented by the support of many partners and donors especially the Italianorganizations, hospitals and centers, American embassy at Baghdad and other donors.