Unite For Sight Builds Local Capacity
We Cultivate Leadership, Talent, and Ideas Among Our Eye Clinic Partners
- Eye care programs are led locally by the eye clinic's ophthalmic staff.
- We support eye clinics so that they can solve local preventable blindness needs over the long term.
- We train local and visiting volunteers to serve as support staff to eye doctors in the field.
- We provide grants to eye clinics to hire local ophthalmic nurses, optometrists, translators, and outreach coordinators.
- We encourage eye clinics to develop innovative ideas that we can support and help to implement.
- The expertise of the eye clinic staff is shared globally when they speak at Unite For Sight's Global Health Conference that convenes 2,500 participatns from more than 60 countries. The ophthalmologists and ophthalmic nurses also have an annual speaking tour among universities in the U.S. to raise awareness about eye care needs and how university students can become involved in eliminating preventable blindness.
Our Volunteers Support Local Eye Doctors
- Outreach teams (comprised of the local eye clinic's staff and Unite For Sight volunteers) travel daily into remote villages, slums, and refugee camps, to provide on-site eye care.
- Visiting ophthalmologist volunteers participate with and provide training to the local ophthalmologists, while visiting optometrist volunteers participate with and provide training to the local optometrists and ophthalmic nurses.
We Build Local Capacity and Create Long-Term Change
- Patients requiring surgery are transported to the eye clinic, receive surgery by the local ophthalmologist, and then return to their home village after their operation
- Local leaders and community members are involved in outreach activities in their village, including helping to register patients, raising awareness, providing education, and accompanying surgery patients to the eye clinic.
- Each village is visited by the outreach team on a monthly basis, which is important to eliminate preventable blindness. One month after their operation, the postoperative surgery patients receive evaluation by the outreach team that revisits their village. During that same visit, new patients from the village and surrounding area are evaluated, treated, and selected for surgery. This process continues, thereby providing ongoing eye care to the communities.
We Multiply Surgical Capacity
- With Unite For Sight's support, the local eye clinics are able to double, triple, and in most cases, more than quadruple the number of surgeries that they provide annually.
- For example, prior to working with Unite For Sight, one eye clinic in Accra, Ghana provided 600 surgeries per year. Today, the clinic provides close to 2,000 surgeries each year. 86% of those surgeries are provided to Unite For Sight-sponsored patients, which means that 86% of the patients receiving eye care from the clinic are patients living in extreme poverty.
- Prior to Unite For Sight's partnership in 2005, the local ophthalmologist in Tamale, Ghana was unable to provide a single cataract surgery because he lacked surgical supplies, and patients could not afford the cost of cataract surgery. In 2007, the local ophthalmologist provided 1594 surgeries coordinated and sponsored by Unite For Sight.
Videos
Ghanaian Ophthalmologist Dr. Clarke Discusses The Significance of Unite For Sight’s Model
Ghanaian Ophthalmic Nurse Margaret Duah-Mensah On Eye Care in Ghana
