{"id":2803,"date":"2013-04-09T06:50:07","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T20:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/inthenews\/?p=2803"},"modified":"2015-04-29T13:39:19","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T03:39:19","slug":"riccardo-duke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/riccardo-duke\/","title":{"rendered":"Riccardo is all smiles thanks to surgeons at the RCH"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Riccardo Duke smiles brightly thanks to surgeons at the RCH. Photo courtesy of the Herald Sun.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thanks to the work of surgeons at The Royal Children\u2019s Hospital (RCH), there is little trace of three-year-old Riccardo Duke\u2019s congenital mouth defect.<\/p>\n

Riccardo\u2019s cleft lip and palate was discovered while still in utero, during his mother\u2019s 20 week scan. The new mother, Maria, was distraught to learn that her first baby would be born with what was described as a hole in his face.<\/p>\n

Two weeks after his birth, Riccardo was seen by RCH Craniofacial plastic surgeon Dr David Chong. Dr Chong and medical staff at the RCH have revolutionised the way cleft lip and palates are repaired, by using a highly planned and exacting technique that requires accuracy down to the millimetre.<\/p>\n

So revolutionary is this technique that it has garnered interest throughout the world, attracting the attention of American and Canadian surgeons who have visited the RCH to learn how to perform the procedure.<\/p>\n

Riccardo is part of a growing generation of children whose facial defects are almost invisible as a result of this new technique. The happy little boy, who doctors had expected would experience speech difficulties, has no such issue and doesn\u2019t stop talking until he closes his eyes to go to sleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surgeons at the RCH have revolutionised the repair of congenital mouth defects. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2803"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2816,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions\/2816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}