Matt Shonfeld: ORBIS

ORBIS was conceived 24 years ago with the aim to eliminate avoidable blindness worldwide by taking medical and surgical skills, readily available in the Western world, to areas of greatest need. Thus the ORBIS Flying Eye Hospital was born - a DC-8 donated by United Airlines (upgraded to a newer and bigger DC-10 in 1994), converted in to a fully equipped, mobile teaching eye hospital.

At present, there are 45 million blind people worldwide with 90 per cent of these living in developing countries. The shocking fact is that 8 out of 10 of these people are needlessly blind as the main causes of blindness such as cataracts, glaucoma and trachoma could be easily and inexpensively treated. Only, in developing countries, the infrastructure to provide this treatment is simply not in place and the problem is escalating. Every minute of every day a child goes blind somewhere in our world. According to the World Health Organisation, without immediate increased efforts the number of people who go needlessly blind will have risen to 75 million by the year 2020.

To lose your sight in the developing world has devastating consequences. For most adults it will result in unemployment and dependence on family and friends. For children the sad facts are that as many as 6 out of 10 do not live to reach adulthood and those who survive stand little or no chance of ever getting an education, job or being able to start and provide for a family.

Avoidable blindness is rarely recognised as a problem of endemic proportion, but the facts tell us it is. However, unlike HIV/AIDS and cancer, the cure is there and the treatment is simple and inexpensive, all that is needed is to make that treatment available to everyone.

ORBIS does not believe the solution is as simple as performing thousands of sight saving surgeries. ORBIS’s ethos is based on the concept that ‘give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and you will feed him for a lifetime’. On board the Flying Eye Hospital is a dedicated international medical crew who, upon invitation by and in close partnership with local governments and institutions, carry out the necessary planning and preparations for an ORBIS programme to take place. A Flying Eye Hospital programme typically lasts 3 to 4 weeks and each one is designed to meet the host country’s specific training needs. During a programme, ORBIS’s international pool of leading medical experts volunteer their time to provide hands-on training in eye health care and surgical techniques to their local colleagues. On ‘screening day’ patients are presented to the ORBIS volunteer doctors who discuss each individual case with their trainee and together they choose the patients who will make the most suitable teaching cases. All patients will be seen, but only 30-40 will be operated on each week; the aim is not to perform as many surgeries as possible, but to enable the local doctors to treat their own patients for years to come.
In 22 years have been conducted over 220 programmes in 67 countries, keeping blindness prevention and treatment a high priority for ministries of health.

Since ORBIS launched in 1982, Offices have been set up in 5 key countries: Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam; its medical volunteers have treated thousands of patients, trained over 63,000 medical professionals who in turn have trained their colleagues, thus creating a ripple effect to give back sight and the hope of a better future to millions of people.