Sada-e-Watan
Sydney ™
sadaewatan@gmail.com
Dr Ramesh Puri
The Fred Hollows Foundation is working hard to restore sight and eradicate preventable blindness in Pakistan
Right now, around 32.4
million people around the world are blind and four out of five of them don’t
need to be. But The Fred Hollows Foundation is working hard to restore sight
and eradicate preventable blindness. Through Sada-e-Watan, the Foundation would
like to proudly announce that wa are working in more than 20 developing
countries, including in Pakistan, where it has been working since 1998.
Dr Ramesh Puri oversees The Foundation’s work in the South Asia and
Middle East region, including in Pakistan. Dr Ramesh is based in Nepal, but
visited Sydney last week to meet with colleagues and share his experience from
the field.
“I am responsible for providing management support to The Fred
Hollows Foundation’s Pakistan programs to ensure that our programs are running
effectively and achieving results; i.e. ending avoidable blindness in
Pakistan,” Dr Ramesh said.
“With the funding support from the Australian
Government and in partnership with the Pakistan Government and private
not-for-profit organisations, The Foundation has worked to strengthen over 50
district hospitals through the provision of equipment support, training of
ophthalmologists, mid-level health workers and primary health care workers, so
that they have been able to provide comprehensive eye care services at primary
and secondary levels.”
In Pakistan, The Fred Hollows Foundation works
with partners to build their capacity to screen for eye diseases, performs
surgery to treat conditions such as cataract and diabetic retinopathy, and
distributes glasses to help improve sight for people with vision
impairment.
The Foundation also supports specialist eye care for children
and adults through a new eye unit at Hayatabad Medical Complex in Peshawar,
which opened a few years ago. The unit’s focus is on helping children with
serious eye conditions and detecting and treating diabetic retinopathy in
adults before the damage becomes irreversible.
The Fred Hollows
Foundation’s Pakistan Program Coordinator, Rashin Choudhry, said before the
unit was opened, people often had to travel long distances to access quality
eye care.
“Before, children in the region needed to travel to far-off
cities to receive treatment for complicated paediatric eye conditions, but they
now can have their operations in Peshawar,” says The Fred Hollows Foundation’s
Pakistan Program Coordinator, Rashin Choudhry.
“Diabetic retinopathy is a
growing problem in Pakistan. In the past, patients would have visited the
diabetes unit but never had their eyes screened until they suffered
irreversible vision loss. They are now being reached much sooner and offered
treatment before it is too late.
"The services are so good we are even
seeing patients from Afghanistan coming for treatment."
New figures show that in
2014 alone the Foundation screened over 434,000 people in Pakistan and provided
more than 4,548 people with glasses.The Foundation also performed 17,576
cataract operations, 7,728 diabetic retinopathy procedures and 180,158 other
sight-saving or improving interventions.
Dr Ramesh has returned to Nepal to continue his work in South Asia and
the Middle East. To support his work and that of The
Foundation, people can donate at: http://www.hollows.org.au/
