What We Do
We conduct annual visual health campaigns to aid the poorest people of El Salvador—those who often have no access to eye care.
Our services are provided at no cost to the patients. Approximately 2000 patients are treated during an annual campaign by our volunteers. For the vast majority of these 2000 patients, we are the only provider of eye care services to which they have access.
We provide:
Restorative sight surgeries
Eye wellness exams
Critical medications
Diagnosis & treatment for glaucoma
Prescription glasses
Sun protecting glasses
We provide these transformative eye services during a one week annual visit to the cities of Santa Ana and San Miguel, El Salvador.
A typical campaign involves approximately 60 volunteers both medical and non-medical. Our San Miguel clinic provides patients with eye examinations, prescription glasses, glaucoma screening and treatment, and basic Ophthalmic medical care.
The Santa Ana clinic has, in addition, access to a dedicated ambulatory eye surgery facility where is provides surgeries to remove cataracts, implant new corneas, correct strabismus, remove pterygium and extract foreign bodies. Many of these cataract patients are bi-laterally blind at the time of surgery and would remain so for the remainder of their lives without our intervention. Most strabismus corrections are pediatric cases.
A Perfect Partnership
We are able to provide these services through our partnership with a local health care charitable organization called ASAPROSAR. This partnership is critical both in allowing us to reach the most needy patients and to efficiently and safely serve them. Not only does ASAPROSAR screen and schedule patients prior to our arrival but provides extensive staff support, ample clinic space, extensive optical equipment as well as the 3 functioning surgical suites. Through this high level of in-country support given by our partner, we are typically able to serve over the course of just 6 days, 2000 patients in total. This includes on average about 130 eye surgeries and the dispensing of over 1600 pairs of prescription eye-glasses as well as sunglasses.
Eye-Glass Dispensary
During the campaign we operate an on-site extensive eye-glass dispensary with over 10,000 pairs of donated and purchased eye-glasses.
To maintain such an extensive database, throughout the year we collect, read, clean, and catalogue thousands of eye-glasses for shipment to El Salvador. We recently purchased eye glass making equipment to aid the fabrication of unusual prescriptions that cannot be found in our current eye-glass inventory.