Early detection, proven remedies, lasting impact: Why primary care must lead global treatment of childhood disabilities

Global health leaders recently gathered at the Skoll World Forum to discuss collaboration, resilience and building a more equitable future. The opportunity now is to carry that conversation forward and bring in an even broader set of voices. The urgency is clear: Too many children are still living with treatable disabilities that shape the course of their lives simply because care does not reach them early enough or consistently enough. If equity and inclusion are to be more than aspirational ideas, these children must be fully considered in how we define public health, child well-being and human potential.

Primary care providers — family physicians, pediatricians and community health workers — know this terrain well. Supporting children’s mobility, growth and development is central to routine care, and clinicians who follow families over time are often the first to identify conditions in routine visits. The conditions themselves are not unfamiliar; they are the kinds of issues that physicians and other clinicians everywhere work to identify and refer to each day. The real challenge is whether early detection and consistent follow-up can reach every child, no matter where they are born.

Clubfoot is one example of that broader challenge and one that physicians and pediatricians in the U.S. identify in utero during routine prenatal scans. Clubfoot is a congenital condition that causes one or both feet to turn inward and down. When identified early, it can be treated effectively with casts, a foot brace worn at night and an outpatient procedure to release the Achilles tendon. That course of treatment, known as the Ponseti method, has endorsements from major medical and health groups.

Yet for many children, especially in lower-resource settings, treatment still comes too late or does not come at all. When that happens, the consequences do not stay confined to a diagnosis. They can shape whether a child can walk comfortably, run, play, attend school consistently and participate fully in everyday life. They can also lead to stigma, fewer educational opportunities and more limited employment possibilities. Disparities like this challenge our shared ideals around equality of opportunity.

Children with treatable disabilities often fall outside the center of the global health conversation. Understandably, attention focuses on urgent crises, large-scale disease burdens and immediate threats to life. Those priorities are real, and they matter. But there is also a need to make room for conditions that may be less visible in public conversation while still having profound and lasting consequences for children and families. A child whose mobility is limited does not always fit neatly into the narratives that drive major international attention, even though the effects on that child’s future can be profound.

That is why mobility is not a secondary issue in childhood, but something deeply connected to opportunity and quality of life. It affects whether a child can join in socially, whether school is accessible, whether parents must shoulder additional burdens that compound over time and whether adulthood begins with a sense of possibility or exclusion. When conditions that limit mobility fall outside global health priorities, the most basic foundations of independence, participation and human potential are left unaddressed.

With World Clubfoot Day on June 3 and the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup, global attention will soon turn toward a sport built around joy, movement and participation. At the very moment the world prepares to celebrate the universal language of play, there are still children whose ability to run, kick a ball or simply move freely has been diminished by conditions the world already knows how to treat. Rather than a source of cynicism, this is an invitation to think more expansively about what inclusion truly means for children.

It should also prompt us to think more carefully about innovation. Effective clubfoot care relies on early detection, timely treatment, constant follow-up and integrating treatment into health systems to reach families in time. That work may be less flashy than the innovations that tend to command attention, but it is no less transformative. It is also the kind of coordinated, longitudinal care that family physicians and pediatricians recognize immediately and treat using the same method in the U.S. as in low-resource settings. This treatment, in many cases, is exactly what separates lifelong limitation from full participation.

Acknowledging those constraints does not mean accepting that children with treatable disabilities should remain peripheral to the broader conversation. On the contrary, it suggests precisely the opposite. When resources are limited, it is even more important to focus on areas where early, coordinated and proven interventions can have lifelong effects. The question is not whether these children should displace other priorities but whether we are willing to widen our field of vision and recognize that conditions affecting mobility, participation, education and dignity belong much closer to the center of serious public health thinking than they often do.

If we are serious about building a more equitable future, that future must include children whose lives can be transformed by care the world already knows how to provide. The opportunity before us is to bring more partners into this work, strengthen the systems that make treatment possible, and ensure that more children have the chance to move through life with health, confidence and possibility. Children with treatable disabilities should not remain at the margins of our attention; they belong much closer to the center.

Daphne de Souza Lima Sorensen is the CEO of MiracleFeet, a global nonprofit based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. MiracleFeet partners with local providers in 38 countries to expand access to life-changing clubfoot treatment.