Cieli Azzurri Associazione Amici Della Chirurgia Pediatrica Odv is a no profit organization based in Milan, Italy. Our activities are centered around the world of pediatric and neonatal surgery. Our main objective is to support the work of professionals operating in these fields, as well as to offer relief to the little patients themselves and to their families. The vast complexity of fields such as neonatal and pediatric surgery pushes our initiatives to be multi-faceted and diverse, in an effort to have the best possible impact on the community. 

Specifically, this means operating in various areas within these fields. Over time, as our organization has grown, these areas have changed, adapting to the needs of the facility with which we mainly collaborated, the Vittore Buzzi Hospital. This went on until 2008, year in which we started channeling our activities into specific projects, as well as collaborating with other facilities beyond the Vittore Buzzi Hospital. Ever since then, the areas in which we operate have essentially stayed the same; they focus on three main aspects of the world of pediatric and neonatal surgery:

Health and Social Assistance

Medical-Scientific Equipment for Pediatric Surgery

Research and Professional Formation

Each of these areas represents a different way in which we strive to pursue our objectives. In this sense, the activities which fall under the “Health and Social Assistance” category represent our most direct effort. Through our “Children Without Borders" project, in fact, we cover the logistical costs involved in the hospitalization of children affected by serious pathologies who originate from difficoult social backgrounds. The vast majority of these cases involve children whose countries of origin do not offer the treatments that they necessitate; a lower number of cases deal with children whose pathologies are so rare that they require intervention from highly specialized professionals. Our Organization takes care of getting in touch with these experts and arranging their intervention on children hospitalized locally.

We believe, however, that offering Health and Social Assistance is not the only way to help children suffering from serious pathologies. Another possible approach is to provide professionals with the most recent and advanced pieces of machinery, in an effort to put them in the best possible position to deal with these difficult cases. The most prominent example of this is given by our project “A Hi-Tech Surgical Cradle”, through which we were able to donate two highly sophisticated surgical cradles to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the Mangiagalli Clinic in the Policlinic Hospital.

Our activities, however, also extend beyond that. It is our firm belief, in fact, that when dealing with cases in such challenging fields as those in question, it is fundamental to be up to speed with the most recent developments in applied research. It is for this reason that we sponsor the participation of professionals from the most prestigious local hospitals to training programs and courses. Our most recent endeavour, “The Fetal Surgery Project”, is an example of our continued effort in this area. This effort has remained steady throughout the years, with a number of initiatives, including “The ECMO Project”, the “Pediatric Trauma Center" and “The Umberto Nicolini Project”.

We believe that the brief overview presented in this article does not fully reflect neither the impact of our projects, nor their full scope and impact. We strongly encourage you, then, to explore the sections of our website dedicated to both active and completed projects. We hope that this will provide a better perspective on what we do overall as an organization, and on the reasons why we choose to focus our endeavours on certain specific initiatives. Furthermore, for a more comprehensive list of our single activities, we would like to direct your attention towards the sections of our website dedicated to their chronology from 1992 until now.