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Community Eye Care Program for marginalised community

Kalyanam Karoti is dedicated & committed to serve the unprivileged community through its community ophthalmic program since 1981. Every year several thousand of population lose their vision, partially or completely, to preventable causes. Kalyanam Karoti’s community outreach eye program covering every nooks & corners of hard-to-reach villages of many districts, where community does not have quality service for eye care. Consequently, large number of population stay deprived of the important eye care service. Our initiatives have benefitted more than 10 lakhs population of four adjacent states of Mathura. Our two eye care hospital located at Mathura have complete eye care facilities and experienced doctor, fulfilling the needs of many vulnerable beneficiaries.

The Objectives

The primary purpose of the outreach is to identify patients with curable blindness. The outreach program focuses mainly on making eye care facilities accessible to many poor patients as well as overall who cannot afford eye care due to their small budgets. It also focuses on making eye care available for isolated communities, which were suffering from poor infrastructure, and a low-density population, which prohibits the lack of eye awareness and facilities.

The rationale for community outreach is that in countries like India, the majority of the people live in rural areas, and the majority of ophthalmic services are located in cities, inaccessible to the populations that need those most. In the rural areas where health care facilities are non-existent, the blindness rate is more pronounced than in urban areas. Because of their poverty and lack of awareness, these people remain needlessly blind. The social and financial hardships created by blindness gravely affect individuals and families, as well as communities and nations at large. The aim of this concept is to make eye care services accessible to such people who are most neglected in our society.

  • To provide eye care services to the rural and hard-to-reach areas.
  • To generate eye health awareness in the remote areas.
  • To reach out to the poorest of the poor eye patients who are socially neglected due to their preventable blindness.
  • To provide the services to the people at their door steps.
  • To help them in rehabilitation socially and economically by restoring their sight.
  • To bring the deserving patients to advanced Base Hospitals through our vehicle; to get them operated and finally take them back to their destinations.
  • To alleviate the sufferings of preventable blindness in and around the area.
  • To educate the community about their eye problems and preservation of their eye sights.

Outreach

The unreached must be reached. The inaccessible must become accessible. Community outreach plays a vital role in extending awareness of eye problems and their solutions into communities not normally served by eye hospitals, eye care clinics and ophthalmology practices. Despite the magnitude of the problem of avoidable blindness in developing countries, studies have shown that only a small percentage of the people needing cataract surgery or other treatment actually seek it. Therefore it is necessary for eye care institutions to reach out to potential patients, the ”unreached”, to provide their services to the people who most need them.

Kalyanam Karoti Outreach eye camps

Community outreach must be a holistic part of what an eye care institution provides - a central and ongoing aspect, not a one-time or occasional activity. Outreach is simply part of the way that eye care programmes should operate.

In order to develop and maintain a high quality, large volume, sustainable cataract surgery programme, it is essential to be proactive about attracting patients instead of simply waiting for patients to arrive on their own.. In other words, it is necessary to generate demand for the services though community outreach. Outreach activities increase productivity, quality of care, and effectiveness of the cataract surgery programmes.

Outreach Programme provides Comprehensive Eye Care to patients from underprivileged sectors. We aim to shed away the socio-economic difference in world of eye care so that every individual could explore the world with a better vision. To put our mission into action, we at KKM have been conducting awareness programmes and Eye examination camps to reach isolated communities with poor infrastructure in peripheral villages.

Service delivery in prevention of blindness is usually based on two different models. The first model focuses mainly on making eye care accessible to as many people as possible. This model is best employed in the urban areas of a country, where there are sufficient eye care professionals, but many of the poor cannot afford eye care from their small household budgets due to the high cost of services.

The second model focuses on making eye care available to people in need who live far from eye care professionals. These communities are isolated, suffer from poor infrastructure, and a low-density population, which prohibits the establishment of a high-volume surgical unit. However, there are many people in need of eye surgery in these areas and we need to plan how to reach them. It is in this setting that outreach can be used most effectively. The Outreach program is to provide eye care services in the rural areas to all economic section of society who cannot reach to these services on their own.

Kalyanam Karoti usually has three specific types of Outreach activities. They are:

  • Outreach on the Wheel (Netra Sachal)

    Outreach on the Wheel (Screening), named as ‘Netra Sachal’, is a unique and an innovative approach where a vehicle equipped with the state of art eye care or ophthalmic devices, renders high quality eye care to socially deprived population particularly to the marginalised families to whom access to eye care services are not within their reach due to lack of transport, poverty, illiteracy and other short comings. The system is a type of redressal and tries to solve these problems by offering free eye care programme to their door steps and provides highest quality of eye care services.

    The outreach drive ventures further into rural areas. The mobile clinic is publicised in advance and people from the surrounding area congregate to be screened. Suitable patients (usually mature cataracts) are then transported to the base hospital on the scheduled date for surgery. The operations are then performed and the patients transported home free of charge. As the outreach here is mobile, this tackles the distance issue while free transport and operation overcome the financial barrier. Learn More

  • Vision Centres for Screening

    A vision centre is a small, permanent facility set up to provide primary eye care services to semi-rural and rural communities. Ophthalmic assistants operate the centre and screen patients for further treatment in the base hospital.
    These sort of permanent eye care facilities in rural areas motivate people to seek earlier treatment for vision problems, allowing them to reintegrate back into the workforce instead of becoming visually impaired. This new pattern of proactively seeking eye care before it is too late makes the role of vision centres even more crucial in mix of outreach initiatives. Of the patients who seek care at these centres, either they are fully treated on-site or are referred to the base hospital for further treatment, usually for surgery or advanced investigations. Vision Centres have been able to achieve much higher penetration of those in need of eye care.
    Kalyanam Karoti presently operates with two Vision Centres at Deeg, Bharatpur and Koshikalan, Mathura. 

  • Community based Eye Camps (Screening)

    In these category, Community Outreach aims to take health care to that part of the community which has no access and awareness of such services. It is providing eye care service to eliminate needless blindness at the patients’ doorstep. Community outreach in eye care is a practice of conducting eye camps involving the local community as partners, thereby creating ownership among the community.
    The Cataract Outreach Activities Protocol guides about the pre-camp activities such as monthly plan/weekly plan schedule, to contact the sponsor, explaining the sponsor about the camp procedures, suggest a suitable date and camp site, to give standard format of notice and poster for sponsors publicity, periodical meetings, transport management etc. and the camp-day activities such as to make ready registers, logistics, instructing the volunteers, collect patients, preparing medical records, arranging food, etc. and the post-camp activities such as arranging transport to take the patients to the hospital, admitting and treatment of patients, to draw camp reports etc. 
    In last forty years Kalyanam Karoti has gained the faith across the communities and these communities want to be a part of our endeavours. They support us by sponsoring various community outreach camps in remote areas and help us benefiting poor section of society. Our technical team with ophthalmologist, optometrist support such type of camps with latest equipment if the social workers want our services.

Cataract operation at Shriji Baba Netra Chikitsa Sansthan Mathura

Base Hospitals

“Shree Jee Baba Eye Hospital” at Goverdhan Road, Mathura was established on 06 August 1996. The Hospital has well-equipped Operation Theatre, 75 beds General ward, and 6 beds private ward along with the screening devices. The qualified Eye surgeons and experts are available round the clock for the public at free of charge.

There are approximately 25 million blind people in India, which is about one fourth of the total blind population of the world. This means 25 out of every 1000 people in India are blind compared to just 3 per 1000 in the developed countries. Blindness in most cases is avoidable and curable. Out of the 25 million, approximately 5 million are blind due to defective cornea. A good majority of these blind are children in their early childhood. Corneal blindness means that one’s cornea, which is the transparent thin outer layer of eye, becomes clouded due to nutritional deficiency, injury or disease such as trachoma, corneal ulcer, conjunctivitis etc. leading to loss of vision. This blindness can be cured in most cases by corneal grafting. Corneal grafting is performed on a patient when voluntary donor donates his/her eyes after death. The sad part is that majority of these blind people never get cured because of non-availability of suitable cornea.

There is severe lack of donor eyes in India and only about 20,000 operations are being performed every year, while 30,000 new victims are added each year to the long list of blind people waiting to be cured. Although there are enough qualified surgeons and plenty of potential patients corneal transplantation is rather scarce for want of donor eyes. Nearly 10 million people die in India, every year. Sadly the corneal donation does not exceed more than a few thousand. The reasons for the very low number of eye donation in India are manifold, for this purpose Kalyanam Karoti established an eye bank at Kalyan Dham Mathura on 2015.

Curable eye disease

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