At the end of March 2024 ECO ran an exciting training course in Bucharest, Romania, for healthcare professionals and parents. The main part of the programme focused on speech, communication and resilience, drawing material from the SCR4Cleft course developed as part of an EU funded project (https://scr4cleft.org) . The second part of the training focused on how parents can support new families with children with clefts in an empathetic and constructive way and also provided some general guidance on how to develop and sustain cleft support groups.

The training was funded by Smile Train and attended by their Europe programme coordinator, Grace Peters. More than 20 people attended the two-day event held at the Marie Curie children’s hospital in Bucharest. Participants included a speech therapist from Kiyv, Ukraine, and parents and health professionals from Chisinau, Moldova. Feedback was extremely positive. We are grateful to surgeon Radu Spataru for coordinating the event and also to Ana Schiau, the local speech therapist who helped run the course with trainers Prof Nichola Rumsey and Gareth Davies from ECO.