Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore

Sankara Eye Centre wins award for diabetic retinopathy project

COIMBATORE: Sankara Eye Centre, with its headquarters here, has won the Asian Hospital Management Award for its “Diabetic Retinopathy Project for Rural India”, its Managing Trustee R.V. Ramani told presspersons here on Tuesday.

The award was presented to the centre at a conference – Hospital Management Asia 2008 – at the Philippines’ capital, Manila, recently. The winner was chosen from 233 entries from 15 countries, he said.

Sankara Eye Centre had been carrying out this project along with the Rotary Club of Coimbatore Central from January 2007 to identify patients with diabetes in the rural areas. The objective was to prevent blindness in these people, which could be caused by diabetic retinopathy.

Sangampalayam village in Pollachi was chosen for the project. The villagers were taught to check sugar in the urine and also diabetes management. Free camps and surgery were also conducted. Now, the centre would extend this programme to more areas, he said.

After replicating its Coimbatore model in Guntur (Andhra Pradesh) and Bangalore, Sankara Eye Centre would open two more full-fledged community eye care hospitals this month.

A 225-bed hospital would be opened in Shimoga (Karnataka) on October 12 and a similar one in Anand (Gujarat) on October 19, Dr. Ramani said.

Both hospitals would perform 25,000 surgeries a year. He said that after the opening of the new hospitals, a total of eight centres across the country would perform two lakh surgeries a year.

While 80 per cent of the surgeries would be done free of cost for the rural poor, the rest 20 per cent would be for the paying public, whose contributions would go to fund the community eye care programme.

The Shimoga and Anand hospitals had been built on five acres each.

“About 40 families who belong to Karnataka have contributed Rs. 40 lakh for the Rs. 12-crore Shimoga project. Many others from elsewhere have also contributed,” Dr. Ramani said.

As for the Rs.15-crore hospital in Anand, the Gujarat Government would provide two buses to transport patients from the villages to the hospital.

Doctors and paramedical and technical staff had all been trained at the headquarters hospital in Coimbatore and now deployed in the new ones.

“Our next destinations are Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. We will finalise the plans by the first quarter of 2009,” he said.

“The objective is freedom from preventable and curable blindness.”

A survey in 2002 by the Central Government had found mild prevalence of preventable blindness in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, while it was severe in Karnataka and most severe in Assam and Mizoram. Illiteracy and lack of access to quality eye care had been cited as reasons. “The only solution is high-quality, cost-effective and easily accessible community eye care,” he said.

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