Three women help each other to a remote eye camp in a Himalayan village.

Education

The Himalayan Cataract Project provides ophthalmic education at all levels. It operates a formal three-year ophthalmic assistant training program at Tilganga Eye Centre in Kathmandu, in conjunction with Kathmandu University. Ophthalmic Assistants learn to recognize and treat basic eye diseases and common ocular infections and provide glasses for refractive errors. They also learn to screen more serious eye disorders and surgical cases and refer them to ophthalmologists. They can provide most basic eye care in remote areas with a fraction of the resources required by an ophthalmologist. By assisting our ophthalmologists and running our primary eye clinics, they are vital to elevating the level of eye care in the Himalaya.

The HCP has set up a three-year American-standard residency training program in ophthalmology that will commence in the fall of 2004. The residency training program will be conducted as a joint effort of the Tilganga Eye Centre and the Nepal Eye Hospital under the National Academy of Medical Sciences. The residency program is designed to train young ophthalmologists to operate at the highest international level of ophthalmology and will adhere to the curriculum established by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Many of the professors in our new residency program will be ophthalmologists that we have trained. The HCP has trained a wide array of ophthalmic subspecialists through international fellowships in the following areas: corneal transplantation, retinal and vitreous disease and surgery, pediatric ophthalmology and strabismus, the medical and surgical management of glaucoma, and ocular plastic surgery. In 2003, a uveitis specialist and neuro-ophthalmologist was trained in the United States, giving Tilganga a full compliment of ophthalmic subspecialists. In addition to sending Himalayan doctors abroad for training, many doctors from such places as Bhutan, India, South Africa, Tibet, China, Argentina, Thailand, the United States, Myanmar, and Ethiopia, have come to Tilganga to be trained in our sutureless cataract surgery and remote delivery techniques (see publications) to bring our methods back to their home countries.