The Hindu : Sankara Eye Hospital for Guntur district

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 09, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Others

Sankara Eye Hospital for Guntur district

By Our Staff Reporter

COIMBATORE, JAN. 8. The Sankara Eye Care Society here, which is carrying out a free outreach programme for blindness eradication, is set to open its first full-fledged eye hospital outside Coimbatore. The new hospital, on the lines of the existing one here, has come up on 4.5 acres at Pedakakani village of Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh. It will replicate the outreach programme carried out here.

The Sankara Eye Hospital, located on the Guntur-Vijayawada Expressway, is scheduled to be inaugurated on March 1 this year.

The Managing Trustee of the society, R.V. Ramani, told presspersons today that the hospital would cater to the districts of Krishna, Guntur, East and West Godavari. "It will have 100 beds for free patients, 20 for paying patients and a modern surgical theatre complex," he said.

The facility would handle 10,000 free surgeries and 5,000 paid surgeries annually. The aim was to increase the free beds to 250 by having an additional ward later, and also an operation theatre, to raise the free surgeries to 25,000 a year.

Dr. Ramani said land had been donated by the Jayachaithanya family of Guntur and the hospital project costs Rs. 6 crores. The new hospital set about the task of identifying the visually affected population through its rural outreach programme. It would involve screening, surgeries and follow-up.

A survey by the society had found that 72 per cent of the population of Andhra Pradesh lived in rural areas out of which two per cent were blind and eight per cent had significant visual impairment. It said 38 per cent of the total visually impaired cases were below the age of 40 years.

The hospital would have prototypes of the programmes implemented in Coimbatore namely, `Gift of Vision' (for the rural poor suffering from cataract and other eye defects), `Rainbow' (to detect eye defects in school students), `Maithreyi' (for poor children in the 3-6 age group in the noon meal centres and also those in the orphanages) and `Swagatham' (for the newborn).

"We have trained eye surgeons and administrative staff and paramedics, all belonging to Andhra Pradesh, to run the hospital. They have all undergone intensive training here and are now equipped with the needed expertise to handle similar cases (as in Coimbatore) in the new hospital."

Dr. Ramani said a new project to control blindness caused by diabetes had been evolved for Coimbatore. Even though the existing outreach programme covered diabetic retinopathy cases, the new one, aimed at establishing an exclusive wing for dealing with these cases at a cost of Rs.4.5 crores. It would be opened by April this year.

"The wing will have a diabetologist, dietician, eye surgeons and a department for counselling patients," he said.

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