Surgery patients crowd around an ophthalmic assistant giving directions at a high-volume remote cataract surgery camp.

High-Volume Remote Cataract Surgery Camps

The Himalayan Cataract Project travels into remote areas where medicine has not made inroads, extending eye care to those who perhaps need it most. In these remote villages where the population is too small to warrant training a doctor, the HCP performs high-volume cataract surgery camps. These camps differ from skills-transfer camps in that the focus is not on training doctors, but on providing high-quality eye care to as many people as is possible. We try to treat every person with a treatable eye disease. Patients typically move from total blindness before surgery to having good ambulatory vision the next day when their patch is removed. In one month, they generally have perfect vision. No words can describe the look of wonder and joy on our patients’ faces when their eye bandages are first removed.

The cost of one sight restoring surgery, including the intraocular lenses, is $12 US, the most cost-effective intervention in all of medicine. We are able to run remote eye camps for an average of USD $4,000.00 (See Funding Needs). John and Cecily Leach donated the Himalayan Cataract Project cataract camp bus, a mobile clinic that gets our teams to remote locations. Since 1994, Tilganga eye camps have examined nearly 150,000 patients and performed 25,000 eye camp cataract surgeries.