Project Description
WHAT DOES THE FOUNDATION DO?
- Samta Foundation is associated with 84 government & charitable trust hospitals in the states of Maharashtra & Madhya Pradesh.
- The Foundation team organizes diagnostic camps in rural & tribal areas with doctors from the hospitals
- In cases where patients are unable to come to the eye camps, the Foundation arranges for their pickup & drop
- Patients requiring vision corrective glasses are given one
- With consent of the family, patients requiring cataract surgery are immediately scheduled for a surgery with the associated hospital
- The Foundation bears the cost of transportation, food, eye glasses & medical expenses for all the patients requiring surgery
- Post-surgical follow-ups are done for all the patients. Eligible patients are scheduled for surgery of the second eye
- From about 8,000 cataract surgeries in 2011, the Foundation achieved over 65,000 cataract surgeries in 2018, screening over 600,000 people.
HOW IT STARTED?
In the year 1990, Dr. Laxmi Kant Mishra, then Joint Director of Health Services, inspired Samta Foundation’s foray into providing free cataract surgeries for people in rural & tribal India. He brought to the attention of the Foundation following factors that were making cataract endemic in rural & tribal India:
- People assume cataract to be part of the ageing process, unaware of the availability of a simple treatment
- Patients are unable to afford even the transportation cost of a few hundred rupees in order to get the free surgeries done in hospitals
- Patients have no caregivers as working for daily wages is a prerequisite for survival
- Many people resort to home remedies and local healers for curing the problem, which only aggravates cataract
- The Foundation team understood how an easily treatable eye problem had overburdened the poorest of families with dependent family members and this led to its foray into providing cataract surgeries
GALLERY
