Humanitarian laser eye surgery? Laser eye surgery for free?
But isn’t this a paradox? How can something so expensive be done for free in Nepal? The picture that most people get when you tell them about doing free laser eye surgery, is that of guilt ridden rich westerners making themselves feel better by paying £500 so that one poor Nepalese person can have the surgery.
However, the model at Tilganga does not rely on such direct aid. They use a cost-recovery system whereby those who can afford to pay, pay the full price, those who can only afford some of the price pay what they can, and those who cannot afford it at all have surgery for free. This system means that the hospital can fund much of its humanitarian work without relying solely on direct aid.
And we intend to implement laser eye surgery using the same system. They have calculated the cost of treating one patient as £50, and fee-paying patients will be charged £350. If we analyse the numbers based on these costs, treating 1,000 fee-paying patients would bring in a profit of £270,000, but the profit would still be £220,000 if 1,000 free patients were treated as well, or £170,000 even if 2,000 free patients were treated.
If we tried to do this in the UK, we would be generating an enormous Enron/Lehman brothers-scale loss.
Of course, this model is based on a clinic that is already setup and running. By funding the significant setup costs of over £1 million we can make a difference. Setup costs would be insurmountable for the hospital on its own as it currently operates at a loss of about £200,000 per year due to the extensive humanitarian work that it undertakes.
So, by providing them with the setting, training and equipment, we have made laser eye surgery at Tilganga a reality and open the door to an excellent source of income to fund further humanitarian work. The economic model of this concept is not crazy – it is not giving the starving wheat and then leaving.