Busy operating rooms at skills-transfer eye camps produce high-quality eye surgery for hundreds of patients.

Skills-Transfer Program

The Himalayan Cataract Project has trained well over thirty surgeons to perform modern sight-restoring cataract surgery through a unique skills-transfer program. A team composed of a doctor, a nurse, and an ophthalmic assistant trains for 4-8 weeks at Tilganga. The surgeon takes an intensive microsurgical course, gaining dexterity under the microscope, while the team develops into a finely-tuned unit. The team then returns to its remote clinic, where it prescreens several hundred patients who are blind from cataracts. The HCP teaching surgeons follow and set up a high-volume skills-transfer cataract camp. The teaching surgeons operate on the first eye of each patient, while the training surgeon assists. Then the training surgeon operates on the second eye of each patient while the HCP surgeon assists. In the course of a typical skills-transfer eye camp, more than five hundred blind people will have their sight restored and each local team and surgeon will perform over 100 cataract surgeries. This is more surgeries than an American ophthalmology resident usually does in a three-year residency program. At the conclusion of the session, the Himalayan Cataract Project donates the operating microscope, surgical instruments, intraocular lenses, and consumables needed to perform an additional 500 surgeries. The HCP then follows up with additional training at the local surgeon’s hospital every year for the next three years. Several of the surgeons we have trained are now performing more than 1000 sight-restoring cataract surgeries per year, and have gone on to train other ophthalmologists. The cost of a skills-transfer program, including all equipment and supplies, is usually around USD $25,000 (See Funding Needs).