Tilganga’s cramped facilities are limiting the potential to achieve the highest level of eye care.

Tilganga Eye Centre Expansion

In only ten years, Tilganga Eye Centre has evolved from a small eye clinic to a model tertiary eye hospital for the developing world. Its facilities, however, have not kept pace with the development of its programs, leaving Tilganga in desperate need of expansion. Its staff of eight ophthalmic subspecialists, trained by the HCP in international fellowships, has the immediate potential to care for all of the patients who come to Tilganga for help. Due to a lack of physical capacity in the hospital, however, our doctors can only care for about 300 of the 500-plus patients who line up outside the door of Tilganga every morning. Tilganga was designed to handle 1,200 outpatients and 75 surgeries per week. The actual numbers are closer to 2,100 outpatients and 90 surgeries per week. The hallways overflow with patients because the waiting area is too small. At any given time, there are three to five ophthalmologists screening throngs of patients in only two examination rooms, while doctors perform nonstop surgery in the two operating theaters. Supporting facilities, such as administrative offices, patient registration, and the cafeteria are desperately inadequate. Meanwhile, the number of patients is increasing, and the Nepal Eye Bank and the Fred Hollows IOL Factory in Tilganga are bursting at their seams.

To alleviate these pressures, the Himalayan Cataract Project is sponsoring the expansion of Tilganga Eye Centre. We have already made significant progress with this project. With generous support from USAID’s Office for American Schools and Hosptials Abroad and numerous other foundations and individuals, we are currently engaged in the first phase of the expansion (architectural design, environmental review, land development, construction of basement and first floor). The first phase provides a new outpatient clinic designed to handle 500 patients per day. This will shift the outpatient care out of the existing building, which will free up the facility for sub-specialty clinics and provide educational space for the new residency.

Residents from the HCP’s new ophthalmology residency program will staff the outpatient clinic. This will give them significant training experience with exposure to almost every eye disease. The residency program will help propagate high-quality ophthalmic care in the Himalayas into the future. The current Tilganga facility will be converted into eight subspecialty clinics. This will give our eight ophthalmic subspecialists the resources, space, and time to care for their more complicated cases. Thus, building the new modern outpatient expansion will increase both the quality and the quantity of eye care we are able to deliver at Tilganga.

The second phase of the expansion will add three additional floors to house an operating theatre, recovery beds, research space, and a microbiology lab, and will allow for the expansion of the Nepal Eye Bank and intraocular lens factory, currently housed in the outpatient facility. The Himalayan Cataract Project is currently engaged in a fundraising initiative to raise the funds to complete Phase II of the expansion ($1,200,000) and to equip the new Centre with state of the art surgical equipment ($500,000).

We strongly believe that the Tilganga expansion will exponentially increase the quality and quantity of eye care in the Himalayas. The following are projected outcomes of the expansion:

• Increased surgical capacity: at least 8,000 cataract surgeries, 250 corneal transplants, 250 retinal surgeries, 1,000 glaucoma cases, 1,000 pediatric cases, and 80 oculo-plastic procedures will be performed annually in the new facility.
• Increased training capacity: the expansion will accommodate our new ophthalmology residency program. It will also allow for more skills-transfer training of ophthalmologists from around the Himalayas and around the world. It will provide space for our future fellowship training programs in anterior segment surgery and corneal transplantation. The ophthalmic assistant program will be expanded to teach at least 30 students per year.

Please help the HCP to alleviate the suffering caused by blindness in the Himalayas by helping us fund the Tilganga expansion project. We will greatly appreciate your generosity, which makes all of our programs possible.