Rawalpindi :An estimated two million people are prone to eye-related diseases in Pakistan while eighty per cent of them can be cured with timely intervention and Al-Shifa Trust is trying its best to serve as many patients as possible with a focus on children.
Eye related problems have been estimated to get tripled globally in the next three decades with developing nations taking a major hit, therefore efforts are needed to prevent the looming crisis, said President Al-Shifa Trust General (r) Rehmat Khan.
Briefing the media on World Sight Day, a global event meant to draw attention on blindness and vision impairment, he added according to WHO, 2.2 billion people around the world live with vision impairment or blindness of which one billion people have conditions that could have been prevented.
He said one of the major obstacle in providing eye care to the needy is lack of the required facilities. “We have taken a new initiative of getting eye donations from the US and Canada. Presently, around 60 operations for eye transplant are being conducted per month and we plan to enhance the number of transplants to 100 in the next six months,” he said.
He explained that an eye transplant costs around Rs120,000 but Al-Shifa Trust has categorized such operations into three groups and trying to conduct 20 eye transplants free of cost, next 20 are subsidised while 20 donations are provided to those people who can bear the expenses.
He further said that Al-Shifa has also planned to set up small eye treatment units in remote areas to provide state of the art eye treatment facilities. He said that founder of the Trust late Jahandad Khan envisioned a specialized eye hospital for children in Pakistan which has been constructed at a cost of one billion rupees and it will be operational in March 2020.
He added it is easy to cure eye disease in childhood rather than wait which results in complications. The hospital will have 25 highly qualified doctors backed by skilled technicians who would be available to serve humanity, he said.
We are spreading awareness regarding different eye diseases through a variety of eye camps, awareness sessions and an active presence on all social media platforms, said General (R) Rehmat.
He said this year, Al-Shifa Trust arranged school screening sessions in 18 schools in twin cities along with an additional eye camp at Gulistan Colony, Rawalpindi so that maximum number of people can be provided treatment facility.
General (r) Rehmat Khan along with Executive Director at Al-Shifa Trust Brigadier (R) Rizwan Ullah Asghar visited schools and had one on one interactive session with children talking about the importance of eye care.
World Sight Day was commemorated at Al-Shifa allied hospitals in Kohat, Muzaffarabad, and Sukkur. The theme for the year was Vision First which synchronizes with the aim and the lifelong dream of the founders of AL-Shifa Trust, said Gen. Rehmat.
