Indonesia has one of the highest rates of blindness in the world, with cataracts accounting for more than 50 per cent of the cases, according to the Health Ministry website. Even though the procedure is the cheapest of three common techniques used by surgeons all over the world, few local surgeons are trained to do it.
Access to eyecare services (especially in the rural areas) is limited and a shortage of ophthalmologists means only 180,000 out of 250,000 Indonesians who require cataract operations every year actually get them.
For farmers that could not afford the five million rupiah corrective surgery, many resign to their fate.
Singapore-based non-profit organisation A New Vision has been organising drives to provide free small-incision cataract surgery, which is a quick surgical procedure that cut and replace the cloudy natural lenses with clear intraocular ones. It costs the organisation S$100 per eye.
Set up in 2010 by four friends who wanted “to do something good for the less fortunate”, A New Vision has so far performed nearly 20,000 surgeries for the rural poor in Java and Sumatra, according to co-founder Ms Effi Jono, 48, who is a trained accountant from Indonesia. The others are Singaporean entrepreneur and philanthropist Tan Ching Koon, and Indonesian social worker Dr Indra Wahidin.
Since 2010, A New Vision has held 20 large-scale drives, each drawing between 600 and 3,000 patients. Its volunteers coordinate with local healthcare workers and officials to identify people with cataract symptoms and ferry them from their countryside homes to the hospitals.
The organisation typically needs S$50,000 to serve 500 patients. Funds have flowed in from multinational companies, foundations and private donors. As of now, A New Vision will remain in Java and Sumatra where it has “barely scratched the surface”, said Ms Effi.
The organisation has also sent local doctors and nurses to Nepal to upgrade their skills, from performing specialised eye surgeries to post-operative follow-up care. It is also raising funds to build a quality but affordable community eye centre in Indonesia.
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Source: The Straits Times, 24 June 2017