It was held yesterday afternoon, on board Nave Volcano and in the presence of the civil and military authorities and the honorable Undersecretary of Defense Matteo Perego di Cremnago, the signing of the collaboration agreement between the General Secretariat of Defense and the National Directorate of Armaments and Smile House Foundation third sector organization.
The naval unit, moored in the port of Ancona, also hosted an operating session in the morning, during which a 6-month-old Pakistani-born child with a maxillofacial malformation known as cleft lip was operated on.
The operation was performed by the team of Dr. Domenico Scopelliti, vice president of the Foundation, in the Nave operating room Volcano, a logistic support unit of the Navy with role 2 capacity or capable of performing surgery and equipped with all modern medical diagnostic equipment.
The collaboration of the Navy with the Foundation starts from afar: on the occasion of the earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 when the aircraft carrier Cavour, in its first operational activity, sailed from Italy to the Caribbean island to bring humanitarian aid and health care. On that occasion, a team of volunteers from Operation Smile joined the crew, performing 35 surgeries aboard. Subsequently, in 2013 the first collaboration agreement was signed and the 30th naval group "Il Sistema Paese in Movimento" always hosted on the aircraft carrier Cavour a team from the Foundation that operated on 114 patients from Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, Ghana and Algeria.
The collaboration then continued with the "Un Mare di Sorrisi" project, through which the Navy has made available, when not used for priority school tasks, ship Cavour and its healthcare area, which has become the setting for many "weekend clinics" organized in Italy and in which numerous patients have been visited and operated on. In addition, the multidisciplinary clinic was inaugurated in 2021 Smile House at the Navy Military Hospital Center in Taranto.
“The signing of this important agreement – declared the honorable Matteo Perego of Cremnago, at the end of the activity on Nave Volcano - it is the strong signal that military healthcare can make its means available for social purposes and to support the weakest and most fragile, who cannot and must never fall behind".
Ship Volcano currently engaged in Operation Safe Mediterranean (WHO) received the battle flag during the Navy Day held in La Spezia on June 9th.
