We certainly celebrated World Sight Day with style last week… by opening a beautiful new centre for eye health at University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia.

“My government wishes to express its sincere gratitude to Operation Eyesight, who put in a huge capital-intensive investment to construct this centre,” Zambia’s Minister of Health, Hon. Dr. Joseph Kasonde, told a crowd of supporters at the opening event. He added, “This eye centre of excellence will certainly raise the profile of eye health services delivery at UTH and in the country as a whole.”

The original UTH eye clinic was a small and dilapidated heritage building, which needed almost total reconstruction to ensure it met clinical quality standards. Today’s bright and beautiful Ophthalmic Centre will offer ophthalmology specialities for treating pediatrics, vitreo-retinal, anterior segment, and glaucoma, as well as provide community eye health and research. It will train professionals (including ophthalmologists) in various eye health areas, and will provide a research and resource centre for all eye health services in the country.

Not only will this facility increase staff training, improve patient screening and treatment, and realize improved surgical outcomes and productivity, there is also another reason to celebrate its grand opening: it’s a wonderful example of what’s possible when we collaborate with generous donors and governments.

The Ophthalmic Centre is the culmination of eight years of hard work and strong partnerships between Operation Eyesight, Nava Bharat Ventures Limited of Hyderabad, India, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Government of Zambia’s Ministry of Health, and University Teaching Hospital. As our Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Boateng Wiafe, told me, “This was a classic example of true partnership. Every partner brought something to the table to get the work done.”

All of us at Operation Eyesight congratulate and acknowledge the partners and donors who made the construction of the new Ophthalmic Centre possible. We were proud to have been part of this project.

We especially would like to thank Delphin Kinkese, our Zambian country manager, and Dr. Grace Mutati, chief ophthalmologist of University Teaching Hospital, for overseeing the project and ensuring the opening was a huge success.
I know the centre will provide Zambians a great resource within the full continuum of eye care services for many years to come!

Operation Eyesight has been working to prevent avoidable blindness in Zambia since 1985, and has been supporting University Teaching Hospital since 2005. Where else do we have hospital programs? Find out here.

The post Zambia’s new eye hospital a celebration of partnership appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

To answer that, picture a tribal woman in a remote part of India, who is going blind from cataracts. She’s a poor woman who knows if she can’t see she can’t work; and if she can’t work, she doesn’t eat. The woman knows there is an eye clinic not too far away that can fix her eyes free of charge. But she doesn’t go.

Why not? Because she knows people with similar problems who have gone to that clinic, and came back worse than before. The woman may be poor, but she’s no fool. She would rather live with the grey fog of cataract-clouded vision than risk being permanently blinded, or in pain due to a botched surgery.

Throughout India and other countries with large populations of low income people, this scenario plays out over and over. Cataract is the main cause of avoidable blindness everywhere, affecting millions of people; yet cataracts are relatively easy and inexpensive to correct.

Many charitable eye clinics, in their efforts to restore sight to cataract sufferers, have been pushing people through the system for years. Medical teams cut corners and take chances that would be unthinkable in other countries. The emphasis on quantity (instead of quality) translates into failed surgeries. It’s still happening today. Many hospitals that offer free treatment to the poor receive their funding based on the number of people they treat, instead of how many people get healed.

In 2003, a landmark research project studied the impact of all those cataract surgeries. It confirmed that yes, cataract was the number one cause of blindness – about 50 percent of all cases. Cause number two? Failed cataract surgeries.

This news landed with a thud throughout the international eye care community. I can tell you how Operation Eyesight responded: we resolved to place quality among our top priorities. We communicated this expectation to our medical partners, and lost some who were unwilling to work towards our goals in the process. Since then, we have invested in upgrades to facilities, training, equipment and procedures. While this is still a work in progress in some regions, we are working with all of our hospital partners to achieve World Health Organization (WHO) standards in surgical outcomes – the same as in Canada, where I live.

But there’s more! Quality is not just about best practices; it’s about how we regard the people who need our help – people like that same tribal woman I mentioned earlier. Come back on June 8 when I’ll describe what we see when we look through her eyes. And learn more about our approach to quality in our Spring 2012 newsletter, “No compromise: Quality is key to achieving sustainable development.”

The post We must see through their eyes (Part 1 of 2) appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

In those days, Operation Eyesight focused mainly on people with cataracts. Cataract surgery is still an important part of our work because cataract remains the world’s leading cause of avoidable blindness. In fact, more than half of the world’s blind people are blind because of cataract.

For a child, being blind means she can’t go to school – and education is the ticket to a better life in the developing world. Blindness for an older person means that he is totally dependent on family for even the simplest things like food and finding his way to the outhouse. In the developing world, a blind woman may be outcast, abandoned by family because she is seen as a burden.

As the countries in which we work develop functional health care systems, hospitals become more efficient and can meet international standards. And strengthening the health care systems is the best strategy to deal with the backlog of cataract cases.

When you donate for a cataract surgery, you’re not only giving a person in Africa or India the gift of sight, but you’re also contributing to the operating costs of that hospital until that hospital is self-sufficient and can cover these costs themselves.

Subsidizing operating costs is important for new partners in India, and for partners in Africa where achieving self-sufficiency is a longer process.

Ultimately, a more efficient, productive hospital means that it will eventually be able to fund the surgeries and other necessary costs itself. That is Operation Eyesight’s goal – strong hospitals and health systems that can operate successfully without any outside intervention. Most importantly, it gets us closer to a world free of avoidable blindness.

The post The gift of sight – and much, much more appeared first on Operation Eyesight.