PNG to get better eye service in Madang

Transcript

The Fred Hollows Foundation says up to a thousand people a year will be able to have their sight restored when a new operating theatre opens in Papua New Guinea in November.

The Executive Director of the Foundation in New Zealand, Andrew Bell, told Jenny Meyer the project has cost US$600,000 and means free eye surgery can be offered to a huge back log of people  with cataracts and a range of other eye problems.

ANDREW BELL: It is a new theatre complex that we're building alongside our current clinic facilities. Our clinic is inside the Modilon General Hospital which is the provincial hospital for the Madang Province in Papua New Guinea.  And we're integrated into the Ministry of Health and integrated into the hospital services. Our clinic facility had just become too small, and there was nowhere really for us to expand. And so we've built this theatre complex alongside our clinic which allows us to transfer the theatre to the new complex and so we can expand our refraction lanes and clinic spaces for our staff to work.

JENNY MEYER: And what sort of surgery, what sort of eye conditions will you be treating in the operating theatre?

AB: So it is a theatre that can only do, under local anaesthetic, so it can't do general anaesthetic. So if someone comes in with a hugely infected eye or an eye injury that needs to be treated under general anaestetic, those will still be done in the main theatre. So it's all the procedures that can be done, pterygium, is one that is a real issue in the Pacific, which is not really that well known. The most famous one of course is cataract blindness, and so the doctors can do that under the local anaesthetic, that'll be the main demand on the theatre.

JM: What are the main eyesight problems in a place like Papua New Guinea? I guess, you know, there's a population there of 7 million people, a lot of them living in rural places.

AB: That's absolutely correct. So the greatest challenge for the people of Papua New Guinea is just access to all health care. And eye care would be one of the one's that is not, not readily available for many, many people. The greatest challenge with eye care is  simple refractive errors. So as everyone gets older they need a pair of glasses and of course some people are born with refractive error. And so the vast majority of patients, somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent, come, are screened, they're tested, we make sure they don't have any eye disease that needs treatment and if they have refractive error they're given a pair of glasses, a brand new pair of glasses. So that's one of the main services that we provide. But those who are avoidably blind, those who are blind for some reason but don't need to be, four out of five of those are because of cataract blindness. And cataract is just something that happens as we get older. It can be speeded up by malnutrition, it can be speeded up by environment, it can be speeded up by diabetes, but by enlarge it's just when people age, we all develop cataract. And so that's the main cause of avoidable blindness. And in PNG because there hasn't been a regular eye service, as a result of that, there's what we call the backlog, so there's this huge number of patients who are just waiting for someone to just come and give them their sight back. And so we would say in any country somewhere between one to three per cent of the population would have avoidable blindness, probably in PNG it's more likely to be five per cent or even above that because there just hasn't been the service provided to the people.