HCP To Perform 2,000 Cataract Surgeries in Kalimpong, India

February 2004

The HCP will open a primary eye care center in Kalimpong this month with a cataract “camp” where HCP doctors will restore sight to over 2,000 people with free cataract surgery over a ten-day period. Kalimpong, located in the mountainous region of West Bengal, India is home to some 600,000 year-round residents who have never received eye care of any kind. This is a signature event for HCP, which has performed tens of thousands of surgeries in the remote Himalaya for nearly a decade.

“Our Kalimpong project marks the opening of the city’s first primary eye care center, a sustainable clinic which will provide ophthalmic screening, outpatient care and basic eye surgery” explains HCP’s co-director Dr. Geoff Tabin. The Kalimpong center is HCP’s eighth permanent eye care facility in the Himalaya and is a strategic part of the organization’s efforts to provide high quality, low cost eye care in the high mountain regions where preventive medicine has not made inroads, and cataract blindness is still a major problem.

Nestled in the lush valleys beneath Mt. Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, the opening of the Kalimpong Eye Care Center is a remarkable, collaborative event for the local residents and peoples of the surrounding areas. As Dr. Tabin and his surgical team performs over 2,000 cataract surgeries during the ten day period, they will be aided by 400 regional volunteers made up of three religious denominations; Buddhist Monks, Sai Baba devotees, and the Maharasha sect of Hindu devotees. These assistants will help feed, shelter and attend to the thousands of patients during the intensive ten-day window. Dr. Tabin explains, “the coming together of these volunteers from fantastically divergent backgrounds makes the opening of the Kalimpong Eye Care Center totally unique. Our ability to coordinate so many surgeries is made possible only by these three groups, each from different religious faiths”.

Our mission is to eradicate preventable blindness through training local and regional doctors and in doing so perpetuate a sustainable, first-rate eye care infrastructure throughout the Himalayan region. When the backlog of cataract blindness has been extinguished in Kalimpong, HCP surgeons will be leaving, but the local ophthalmologist and his ophthalmic assistants will remain at the Kalimpong Eye Care Center. In addition, HCP will donate approximately $25,000 worth of tools and instruments to facilitate a years worth of continued operation.

“The relationship between local doctors and world-renowned cataract surgeons, having been cemented by training, education and operating en masse together, sends a message of peace and cooperation, which could not come at a more important time in our world” explains high-altitude mountaineer Pete Athans, a successful seven-time Everest climber and HCP spokesman. “What these doctors are doing is truly remarkable”, he adds.