Childrens Heartlink

“The form 990 is available to the board of directors for review before filing.”

“The organization's conflict of interest policy covers all members of the board of directors and officers, upon becoming a board member, and at least annually thereafter, each director is required to complete a disclosure form to disclose relationships that could create potential conflicts of interest.”

“The compensation for the president is reviewed and approved by the executive committee, the organization hired an outside compensation analyst to grade and review all positions at the organization in 2016. From the analysis, new salary increase guidelines were established and shared with the board of directors and supervisors, who were trained on the new compensation structure. The documentation of the deliberation and decision can be found in the executive committee meeting minutes. Annually, the outside compensation analyst provides an update to the salary ranges. Job descriptions are re-evaluated to the outside compensation analyst if job roles significantly change or a new role is created for the organization.”

“Governing documents are available upon request.”

“Programming. The programs team consolidated leadership in asia under one country director. The senior technical advisor for africa was named to oversee exploration of partnerships in angola, ghana and namibia. The programs team fully executed our blended model (in-person and remote training), conducting 27 in-person visits, 124 remote trainings, and 10 community trainings reaching non-chl partners. In total 4,437 clinicians were trained. This was acheived by organizing a total of 603 volunteer engagements, resulting in 1,037 training days, valued at 1,064,525 in donated time. Innovation and growth: significant use of childrens heartlink centers of excellence (coe) and partners for south-to-south training continued this year. Chl together with one of our coes demonstrated the ability of extended reality technology to simplify the understanding of complext defects and improve treatment planning in a pilot project. In addition, a novel pathways of care partnership was developed with a leader in telemedicine screening in brazil and funded for execution next year. The cumulative result of these efforts are that 91% of our partners made progress towards becoming a coe as planned, peforming more than 12,500 surgeries, 4,700 interventional catheterizations, and helping more than 213,000 children.”

“Outreach accomplishments: we continued to expand our efforts to engage existing and new partners and supporters. We have issued regular newsletters to supporters, partners and volunteers. We grew our social media audience through consistent, engaging posts and amplified our mission through collaboration with partner hospitals, volunteer institutions and corporate partners. We continued leveraging our website with monthly blogs and launched new website optimized for supporter engagement and growth. Additionally, we continued to host webinars for advocacy and education opportunities for supporters, volunteers and healthcare professionals in low-to middle-income countries. We also continued our membership in global health working groups/organizations.”

“Advocacy accomplishments: children's heartlink continued to participate in high-level global coalitions and to lead global advocacy for better recognition of pediatric and congenital heart disease by policymakers and governments. Chl continues to lead the global coalition for pediatric and congenital hearts advocating for childhood-onset heart disease recognition globally and strong government outreach for support of a world health assembly resolution for childhood-onset heart disease. We participated in who consultation on the development of a framework for screening, diagnosis and management of birth defects and provided valued technical expertise on the most common birth defect, congenital heart disease. We continued leading global action for congenital conditions, a coalition with other nongovernmental organizations working on addressing the burden of birth defects, advocating globally through advocacy and awareness building events during high-level multilateral gatherings. We generated and shared evidence to inform policy and practice guidelines chl staff delivered 5 presentations at international meetings, organized 6 events, 1 ministry of health stakeholders meeting, and staff published 4 peer-reviewed journal articles on health topics represening the needs of children with heart disease.”