Cleft lip babies glow with smiling faces again

Clarence Liu Sze-wai
Associate Consultant (Surgery)
United Christian Hospital

“Many parents do not give up when they are told that their fetus has cleft lip and palate. Nonetheless, they continue the pregnancies because they trust our team. I thus have a strong urge to spend all my effort to heal every unfortunate baby.” Dr Clarence Liu has been working in paediatric surgery for more than 10 years. He was trained at Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital in the United States for a month and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan for a year. He always hopes to introduce new technology and knowledge from overseas to enhance the standard of treating patients with cleft lip and palate in Hong Kong so that they smile again and speak with a loud clear voice confidently.

“Not many doctors are interested in this area,” Dr Liu says. “There are about 100 cases of cleft lip and palate in Hong Kong every year, not a large number when compared with other Southeast Asian countries. On the other hand, the operation is very complex and result will only be seen after several years. However, your effort pays off when you see a once shy patient now shows his smiling face with confidence.” He recounts a patient aged around 20, though underwent previous cleft lip and palate surgery and resulted in better appearance, still has problems with heavy hypernasal speech and unclear pronunciation. Dr Liu and his team decided to conduct a buccal flap surgery on her, which was also the first of its kind in United Christian Hospital (UCH). After a successful operation, the patient regained not only her speech, but also the confidence to face job interviews.

In the future, he will work with the UCH dental team to use computer software for pre-operative planning for orthognathic surgery, which is deemed to be more accurate and in details compared to traditional dental cast model.