By Madeleine Stone  @themadstone

Gift giving takes many forms during the holiday season. But Scott Bartlett, a professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the Peter Randall Endowed Chair in Pediatric Craniofacial Treatment and Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, outshone many this past Christmas when he orchestrated a $12,000 donation to the Odessa Regional Children's Hospital in Ukraine. The grant enabled doctors to perform life-saving surgery on dozens of infants with congenital heart defects.

“This donation saved our work and our staff,” says Roman Lekan, a cardiac surgeon at the Odessa hospital.

Bartlett’s recent fundraising endeavor is only the latest magnanimous act from a doctor who has been on a 28-year odyssey to help some of the hospitals with the greatest need in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the years, he has obtained funds for more than a dozen hospitals in Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia, in addition to taking nearly 70 volunteer trips to Poland to train doctors and perform surgery.

A craniofacial surgeon by training, Bartlett’s long relationship with hospitals of Central and Eastern Europe began in 1986, when he was invited by the nonprofit Project HOPE to attend a teaching conference at the Children’s University Hospital in Krakow, Poland. He quickly developed a strong connection to the country and its children and from 1986 to 1991 paid annual visits to the hospital to teach, procure equipment and perform plastic surgery on children suffering congenital deformities of the head and neck.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hospital’s financial situation deteriorated rapidly. Bartlett began paying more frequent visits, and was approached by numerous doctors and families for additional help procuring equipment and treatments. Recognizing there was only so much aid he could provide on his own, Bartlett launched a charitable foundation in 2005 to help pediatric hospitals in Central and Eastern Europe. During its nearly 10 years of operation, his foundation raised more than $600,000 for well-managed yet severely underfunded hospitals to purchase needed equipment.

"The mission [of this organization] was to find hospitals that not only have the need but possess the infrastructure to assure the donated funds are fully utilized for the maximum benefit of the children," says Bartlett.

This past fall, Lekan found himself in a difficult situation. His hospital was out of oxygenators, machines needed to perform heart surgery on small children. As a result, he was unable to treat infants who suffered congenital heart defects, including 15 patients in critical condition. He appealed to the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and, when the government was unable to provide aid, he reached out to Bartlett, a long-time friend and colleague. Bartlett, who had visited Lekan’s hospital in the past and seen incredible work being done with very modest resources, reached into his network of charitable donors and was able to procure a life-saving donation, allowing the hospital to purchase 22 oxygenators.

Bartlett continues to take regular trips to the Krakow hospital, now the Jagiellonian Children’s University Hospital. For more than a decade he has also fostered a unique exchange program wherein U.S. surgeons visit Central and Eastern European hospitals to teach and to assess equipment and educational needs, and Eastern European hospitals send surgeons on month-long visits to CHOP to receive specialized training. To date, Bartlett has brought nine Eastern European physicians, including Lekan in 2005, to visit CHOP.

In all of his philanthropic endeavors, Bartlett has been grateful to have the support of Penn’s administration and a wide range of generous alumnae.

“Much of this would not have been possible were it not for Penn’s strong commitment to giving back to the global community,” says Bartlett. “It’s a pretty amazing thing, getting to practice medicine while achieving this sort of high-impact philanthropy.”