A dream has come true
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“For ten years now, I have wanted to take laser eye surgery to the developing world because uncorrected refractive error – bad eyesight – is just as big, if not a bigger problem than cataracts – 48% of visual impairment is due to uncorrected refractive error. But every time I talked about it with colleagues they would tell me that I’m mad, it’s untenable, you can’t do laser eye surgery for free. I just didn’t know where to start. But then everything suddenly came together two years ago.” Prof Dan Reinstein
Prof Reinstein learned about Tilganga Eye Hospital when he met and chatted with Dr Geoff Tabin (co-founder of the Himalayan Cataract Project). He immediately saw the potential for introducing a laser eye surgery department.
“It would be so easy with the entire infrastructure already in place. To be honest, I’m ashamed that I didn’t know about Tilganga 10 years ago. “
Humanitarian laser eye surgery for free.
Since the official launch of the London Vision Clinic Foundation on the 16th of September 2010, the foundation has already made significant progress. Carl Zeiss Meditec, through Prof Reinstein’s contact as their lead consultant, have pledged a laser system to the clinic. The laser is the same one that the London Vision Clinic uses: the best laser in the world. The laser is worth £292,000, but they’ve agreed to sell it for £42,000.
The Nepalese clinic has already identified their first surgeon and laser technician, and both Dr Kishore and Gopal have been trained at the London Vision Clinic for two months. Dr Kishore began treating his first patients in Nepal in November.
Dr Kishore is a very experienced eye surgeon who has been working for the Tilganga Institute for 3 years. He spent 16 months running one of the community eye hospitals in Hetauda, where he worked in the hospital every day. Most of the time there would not be enough space in the hospital for all of the patients, so they would have to leave the patients outside, or setup tents to give them a place to sleep, or even transform the waiting room into a dormitory. He would also spend the majority of his free time, his Saturdays “off”, working in eye camps. During his year there, he did 1,600 paying surgeries and over 1,000 free patients.
“We cannot believe how lucky we are to have found a conduit for the work that we wanted to do, but didn’t know how to start.”
The London Vision Clinic Foundation could have tried to build something from the ground up, but by linking up with the Tilganga project, the impact factor will be massively increased. The help of the London Vision Clinic Foundation means extended capabilities for programmes that were previously underfunded.
In fact, the more the Foundation can help them, the more they can help everyone else. They have plenty of manpower, incredible ideas on how to tackle global preventable blindness, infrastructure already in place, and inspirational ideals and goals. The Tilganga Eye Hospital is one of the premiere organisations tackling the problem of visual impairment in the world – “I see them as one of the major contributors to the WHO Vision 2020 initiative to eradicate preventable blindness.“
Their limitation is funding, but the London Vision Clinic Foundation can help provide them with a way to fund themselves, while at the same time helping people in a desperate situation to see. This is the horse that we need to back.
“Blind people are blind everywhere. They have the same sentiments, and after seeing they are going to express the same sentiments, so that’s why our work is very special. We should not think about boundaries, I think. We should think about human beings as one big family” Dr Sanduk Ruit, Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology, Kathmandu, Nepal