Outreach Eye Camps in Ghana

Drs. Anya Gushchin and Brent Hayek led an oculoplastics workshop at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi, Ghana from April 23rd-30th. The training consisted of both lectures and hands-on clinical training with KATH Drs. Armah, Agyeman and Gifty; oculoplastic nurses Vida and Hannah; and ophthalmology residents.

Prior to the workshop, the KATH team gathered together oculoplastics patients requiring specialized treatment, many of whom would not have received care otherwise. A total of 35 patients were seen over the course of the program. The whole oculoplastic team was trained in fitting of ocular prosthesis and made real headway in making an institutional change to place a conformer at the time of enucleation/evisceration surgery to prevent socket contractures. This is a perfect example of how HCP is able to bring together American and Ghanaian ophthalmic professionals to provide high quality treatment and improve overall eye care.

A special thank you goes out to the nurses and anesthesiology team and the OMFS division who lent their bone saw thus making an orbital case possible for the first time. We would like to also recognize Mr. Roland Scott, an ocularist from Chicago, who donated 29 prostheses and many conformers for the patients of KATH.

In December, HCP partner Dr. Judith Simon brought a team from the Tamale Teaching Hospital to Yeji, a village along the Volta River some 300 kilometers south of Tamale. It was Dr. Simon’s second trip of the year to Yeji — both on Saturdays, the day she leads outreach trips into the countryside to provide eye care for residents living in remote and hard-to-reach places. Her team performed 30 cataract surgeries that Saturday, contributing to the record number of 3,494 total surgeries HCP and its three implementing partners performed in Ghana during 2016 - more than half took place in outreach settings. 

The numbers, though, don’t tell the heart of the story about our work in Ghana. Every single cataract surgery we perform changes a human life for the better, in many cases, profoundly. In Yeji, Dr. Simon’s team gave sight to a 23-year-old woman who had been blind since birth. Another woman, from a nearby village, returned to Yeji after having had surgery there during the previous outreach. She brought five members of her village with her, all of them blind, all of them living with the belief that blindness is simply an inevitable part of aging. While one of those people had untreatable glaucoma, the team from Tamale was able to restore the sight of the other four with a simple, inexpensive procedure. Dr. Simon, who has worked full-time in Ghana for the past three years, joked about the unofficial recruiting that helps spread the word of HCP’s work. She said, “We told that woman she’ll be getting a percentage soon!”