Students unite for sight

What is Unite for Sight?

It is a non-profit making organisation that empowers communities to improve eye health. We send volunteers from the United States, England, and many other countries to Ghana and India, where they work with eye clinics.

What do the volunteers do?

We have ophthalmologists who provide surgery and train local ophthalmologists. Volunteer optometrists work directly with local optometrists and ophthalmic nurses in programmes in rural villages. And we have undergraduates, medical students, and public health students. They go to rural villages and help ophthalmic nurses and optometrists with screening to measure visual acuity and prescribe glasses. They also help to identify patients who need cataract surgery and care for glaucoma. Suitable patients can be taken back to the clinic, where the local ophthalmologist provides surgery. Every year we send 250 volunteers abroad to eye clinics to help to provide more than 7000 surgical procedures to restore sight a year.

Is Unite for Sight present at universities?

We have groups at US and Canadian universities. Students regularly provide vision screening at soup kitchens. These identify patients who may need additional eye care. Patients who have not been to an eye doctor in the past three years and have not had the money or health insurance coverage for eye examinations are matched with free health coverage programmes.

How did you start the organisation?

I worked during the summer of 2000 at an eye doctor’s office in Connecticut, about an hour away from Yale University, where I was an undergraduate. There were a lot of patients who had not been to an eye doctor before they lost their sight from glaucoma. After hearing a number of their stories I realised that there were so many people, many homeless, who were not even aware that they should be going regularly to an eye doctor. I thought that it would be great to go into community centres and inform this population about the resources available.

How did Unite for Sight grow?

I contacted medical advisers and offices for students’ affairs about the opportunity to start a group based on the model that had been developed in the previous three years at Yale. Students were excited about trying to prevent blindness. Within months of the initial plan, we had 75 groups.

In the summer of 2004 we started to develop international programmes. A medical student who had been working in a village in Ghana for several summers heard of Unite for Sight from a friend. She contacted me, wondering whether Unite for Sight could help. We developed our international programmes first in that village, and since we have expanded the programmes to thousands of villages.

Has the initiative expanded beyond eye care?

In the spring of 2004 we had our first annual conference, which focused mainly on eye care. While planning the next conference we saw how many different strategies there were for dealing with malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. And many of these strategies apply to different disciplines. We thought that it would be wonderful for the people involved with eye care to learn about strategies used in malaria, for example. And for people involved with AIDS, it would be great for them to be aware of eye care in communities where they work. Now our annual conference covers the extent of global health, public health, social entrepreneurship, and international development, so people can learn about the many different aspects of improving health care worldwide.

What skills do you need to run the organisation?

When I have an idea I want to take action. Seeing a need and being able to act on it to try to create a solution that can help a lot of people—that’s been vital. Teamwork and collaboration are also important, and just having the opportunity to speak to people.

What drives you to do this as well as study?

The eye clinics that we work with internationally are so inspiring. They’ve been working hard to provide eye care services for patients in villages. With Unite for Sight, they now have greater capacity—many now provide more than 2000 surgical procedures a year. The stories about the patients who’ve benefited are so inspiring as well. I want to help as many people as I can and keep taking action on ideas so that Unite for Sight can constantly grow and expand.

Competing interests: None declared.

Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

       

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