GROUP PLANS TRIP TO TREAT AILING KIDS.

Byline: Sherry Joe Crosby Daily News Staff Writer

Hoping to reach severely ill children, members of a Santa Clarita-based aid group are traveling to El Salvador this week to train doctors and nurses in life-saving heart surgery techniques.

The training mission is the first for the California chapter of Healing the Children, a nationwide nonprofit organization that has provided medical care for 46,000 seriously ill children transported to U.S. hospitals.

The group hopes the two-week trip will help needy children - and lead to a permanent information exchange among heart specialists in Latin America and the U.S.

"Healing the Children has given them a second chance. They've received treatment and gone back to their families," said John Howard, board president. "But to be able to teach people, we're looking at hundreds of children who will be helped by this."

This Friday, a 10-member surgical team from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles will travel to San Salvador to train counterparts in operations that involve sealing holes in hearts and correcting narrowed valves. The team plans open-heart surgery for 12 to 14 children ages 3 months to 13 years.

In the United States, fewer than 1 percent of newborns have fatal heart conditions, said David Ferry, an Encino pediatric cardiologist who is assisting the team. In El Salvador, he said twice as many newborns have fatal heart conditions.

To combat heart problems, the team is taking more than $150,000 worth of donated medical equipment that ranges from sophisticated ultrasound machines to scalpels, retractors, syringes and needles.

Rotary clubs here and abroad raised $30,000 for an echocardiograph machine that uses ultrasound to visualize the internal structure of the heart. The machine is the first of its kind in the Central American country, said Clare Short, a member of the Tarzana-Encino Rotary Club, which helped raise money for the equipment as well as an advance trip in November.

"The most critical need for the team was to have an ultrasound system or echo machine so they could examine babies' hearts and determine the heart condition," Short said. "We feel real good."

The medical team, which includes surgeons, physicians, nurses and an anesthesiologist, also is donating time and services. For Ferry, the expedition represents an opportunity to put his skills to work in a country ravaged by civil war and poverty.

"It's one of the best decisions professionally I've ever made," he said. "It's a nice feeling. You get back what you put in. We're helping the lives of children who normally wouldn't live."

Although Salvadoran doctors have the medical expertise to solve many of the heart problems they see, they don't have the necessary equipment to do the job, organizers said.

"They have the building blocks. They have the ability to learn," Ferry said. "They lack the basics."

And heart problems seem to be rampant because of widespread poverty, malnutrition and intermarriage, Ferry said.

Healing the Children was founded in 1979 by Embleton and her husband, Gary, after their adopted daughter from Korea died suddenly from an infection that spread to her lungs.

Since then, the group has provided free medical care for thousands of children from around the world. Under the program, children have been brought to this country for surgery, while others were treated in their own countries by traveling teams of doctors.