Himalayan Training Programs

Tilganga serves as the educational base in the Himalayan region with a full residency program in ophthalmology, a training program for ophthalmic assistants and cataract surgery training for teams from throughout the developing world.

North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic

In 2004, HCP and Tilganga embarked on a long-term effort to train North Korean providers and establish a cadre of capable and effective surgical teams to improve the level of eye care in North Korea.

Thanks to support from the Sarlo Foundation, HCP supports eye care teams from North Korea to train at Tilganga. As of 2008, an on-going relationship allows for medical exchanges and training in microsurgical cataract operations. Today, partners HCP, Tilganga and The Fred Hollows Foundation are together helping North Korea’s Ministry of Health determine a strategy to improve eye care for the country’s 23 million inhabitants.

Initially, in 2004, two North Korean ophthalmologists, Dr. Kang Hongchan and Dr. Ri Kang Un, attended microsurgery training at Tilganga with financial assistance from HCP. This led to a visit to North Korea by Dr. Sanduk Ruit and a small team from Tilganga that performed 707 surgeries in a week as part of a “cataract surgery skills transfer workshop.”

To best understand the need for cataract surgery in North Korea, consider the country’s “cataract surgical rate” (CSR). CSR is expressed as the number of operations per year, per million of a given population. The World Health Organization's accepted CSR standard is 3,000 per year, per million of a population. North Korea's CSR is 200. This is extremely low for a country of 23 million people.

Until 2006, most cataract operations performed were done without the use of an intraocular lens, the modern standard for cataract surgery that replaces the cataract affected lens in the eye with an intraocular lens. Since the project’s inception, both the CSR and the skill level of the North Korean ophthalmologists are rising.