Keynote Speaker –
David Chang, M.D.
Rengaraj Venkatech, M.D.
Haripriya Aravind, M.D.

One of the most impressive slides shown during the webinar tonight (Nov. 19th) was this slide at the beginning of Dr. Haripriya’s presentation of the poor distribution of ophthalmologists in the world in comparison to the areas of needs for global blindness.  I don’t know if many have seen this cartogram before, but it is impressive to me each time that I see it.  Another corrollary of this depiction is that even within developing countries where there are too few ophthalmologists, the distribution within the country is also highly favoring capitol cities and major urban areas sometimes with large areas of the country under-represented.

The hopeful thing is that there are many efforts going on world wide that beginning to address some of these needs including concentration on resident education, system development, efficient cataract surgery that is low cost and even the potential for a high powered MSICS simulator to train 1000’s more cataract surgeons to a high standard.  The next 10 years will prove to be an exciting time for cataract blindness treatment around the world.

I would welcome others to comment here on some of the take away points from the webinar presented tonight by Dr. Chang and Dr. Venkatesh in regards to what you heard about training, complication rates, and any questions that may arise from this.

We would encourage discussion here and also ask anyone interested to consider joining the MSICS discussion group which is being started via google groups.  https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/global-cataract

To read the entire article entitled:
“Complication rates of phacoemulsification and manual small-incision cataract surgery at Aravind Eye Hospital” 
by Aravind Haripriya, MD, David F. Chang, MD, Mascarenhas Reena, MS, Madhu Shekhar, MS – CLICK HERE