Rheumatic Heart Disease
Finding and treating those children most at risk
Enabling early detection and access to treatment
Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) is a serious disease involving permanent damage to the heart valves after a person has acute rheumatic fever (ARF).
Severe RHD can lead to conditions such as heart failure, stroke, disability and premature death. It most commonly affects children and young people and the effects can be lifelong. Timor-Leste has one of the highest rates of RHD in the world.
RHD is preventable with early detection and access to treatment.
We are currently supporting the Ministry of Health by promoting early detection and running the national database of RHD patients, helping manage the 680 current patients living with RHD in Timor-Leste.
What are we doing?
Screening For RHD
We promote early detection of RHD through screening and access to echocardiograms.
In 2025
We helped 680 patients access life saving penicillin
Supporting access to treatment
Every week our nurses collaborate with Ministry of Health doctors and nurses to ensure access to life saving penicillin.
In 2025:
We helped 164 children with RHD access penicillin
Develop national guidelines
We created the guidelines that the Ministry of Health has now adopted as their official RHD guidelines.
They are being used to help model a new national program which includes training of healthcare workers to give penicillin injections, and managing the diagnosis and treatment of RHD patients.
In 2022:
We developed guidelines for the use of less painful Benzathine Penicillin G
Training and Mentoring
Using our approved RHD guidelines we are working with the Ministry of Health to to implement RHD training for doctors, midwifes, pharmacist, and nurses across Timor Leste.
This training will improve early detection and access to appropriate care including life saving antibiotics
Since 2022 we:
Delivered RHD training in 10 municipalities
Community Engagement
Our team works with local health staff to build community awareness and engagement. This is critical to promoting RHD action
Within 2018 until 2022 we:
Have managed to organize 6 community engagement event
Latest News about our RHD Program
How your donation helps
A little goes a long way to improving health in Timor-Leste
Benzotine Penicillin
$20
The cost of a benzocaine penicillin dose from Australia. Benzocaine is less painful for the patient than the currently available powdered penicillin.
RHD Doctor
$850/m
Covers the cost of a local doctor in our RHD mentoring program.
RHD Nurse
$650 /m
Covers the cost of the salary for one of our RHD nurses.
What's next?
Grow our current RHD program to give the gift of good health to even more children.
It currently costs around $100,000 a year to provide the current RHD service.
In the future we would like to further develop training on the national guidelines, fund an echocardiography training (with Menzies School of Research) program, support research and develop audio-visual community education resources.
Who we work with on this program?
Timor-Leste Ministry of Health
FUNDING PARTNER
East Timor Hearts Fund
FUNDING PARTNER
Menzies school of health research
FUNDING PARTNER
