OCULAR
Step on board the Flying Eye Hospital Non-profit brings doctors across the world. Aidan Hanratty reports
O
rbis is an international nonprofit that brings people together to fight avoidable blindness. Its efforts include improving the skills of ophthalmology faculty in underdeveloped regions, establishing wetlabs, launching fellowship training programmes and developing subspecialty education hubs. As well as long-term sponsorships and training programmes in countries worldwide, in 2019 ESCRS sponsored three young ophthalmologists to travel on the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital Associate Programmes to Vietnam and Myanmar and sponsored two ophthalmologists from Ethiopia to attend their 37th Congress of the ESCRS in Paris, France.
TRAINING THE TRAINEES Basak Bostanci Ceran MD first learned of the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital (FEH) when she was completing her fellowship in the United States. Her mentor, Professor Samuel Masket, was a participant and spoke highly of the programme. The FEH had EUROTIMES | MARCH 2020
visited her home country of Turkey so it was already an idea she was familiar with, and when she was asked if she would like to apply to volunteer, she didn’t think twice. “As an ophthalmologist, I want to do the best I know, which is doing surgeries or training other people. Training the trainees and giving education without taking or without expecting something really opened my eyes and opened my heart,” she said. Dr Basak travelled to Huế in Vietnam for one week, where she worked with local fellows and residents early in their careers. She helped train them using a cataract eye simulator, as well as helping out during postoperative procedures and giving a lecture on cataract surgery. Upon returning from Vietnam, she reflected on how different her everyday experience was. “It is very easy to complain when you’re just sitting in your home town, thinking that some surgeons from particular universities or surgery centres have more than you do. But when you go to Vietnam and see what they don’t have, you feel very grateful for everything.”
Courtesy of Basak Bostanci Ceran MD
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Basak Bostanci Ceran MD performs a postoperative evaluation in the local hospital in Huế, Vietnam
While the hospitals in Vietnam may not be as well-equipped as those in Europe, the visiting hospital more than makes up for any shortcomings.
