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Bringing sight to the needy
By Jahan Aliyeva
Baku sun, 07 March 2003
BAKU — Seventy-five year old Tutu
Salahova found that her eyesight was fading. While she assumed age was a
factor, the persistent double vision prompted her to visit the eye doctor.
She was told that she had a cataract — a relief as cataracts nowadays
can be easily removed.
Then she was told the price: $300.
“Just imagine, $300. My goodness!” she exclaims, her hands in the air.
“I’m a pensioner, and I haven’t so much money.”
She saw several eye doctors last year and was faced with two realities:
either a doctor was too expensive, or she had no confidence in his
abilities.
Then she went to prominent Baku ophthalmologist Chingiz Jerrulla-Zadeh.
While his private clinic was too expensive, he proposed an alternative:
The Caspian Compassion Project–Eye Clinic for the Poor (CCP), an
international nongovernmental organization that treats eye problems of the
vulnerable population.
Jay Randall, CCP director, says that he got the idea for an eye clinic
after visiting a humanitarian aid conference focused on Central Asia back
in 1995.
“It became obvious that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
areas away from the center — particularly the farther they were from
Moscow — were getting short shrift,” says Randall, whose background is
in education and in business. While at the conference he talked to people
interested in doing work in the Caucasus.
“I met an eye doctor who was interested in working here, and he asked me
if I’d be interested in doing the logistics,” he says. “I naively
said ‘yes’.”
The idea was that they could build something that the local population
could see and reproduce themselves.
Randall, his wife Teri and their three children first came here with some
American ophthalmologists to start the clinic in 1996. Over time, the
clinic evolved, and the foreign doctors shared the work with local
ophthalmologists until it became a fully local medical staff.
Today the clinic has a staff of 20, including seven doctors. Every year
U.S. eye specialists come to the clinic to train the doctors on the latest
Western techniques and equipment.
In addition CCP sends its staff to an eye clinic in the Dominican Republic
to see how it manages a similar clinic.
International donor organizations, as well as oil companies doing business
in Azerbaijan have provided for equipment, a new operating room, as well
as covering the expenses of the visiting doctors, while clinic fees, which
Randall says are minimal, pay staff salaries and cover basic expenses.
Randall notes that, almost all patients are able to pay that, in fact a
few months ago the clinic saw its 3,000th cataract surgery patient.
“Of course, we cannot treat or operate on all of the people who need to
be operated on,” he says, adding that they take care to ensure those
being treated are truly in need. “If we operate on rich people then it
will mean that we wouldn’t able to treat and operate on poor people.”
A cataract is a cloudy area in the eye’s lens that can cause vision
problems. The lens is the part of eye that helps focus light onto the
retina that sends visual signals to the brain. The most common type is
related to aging. The main symptoms of a cataract are considered to be
cloudy vision, problems with light, double or multiple vision.
According to a doctor at the Azerbaijan Institute of Eye Diseases, the
bottom price of cataract surgery at this clinic is $200.
“However this is using the method used during Soviet times,” the
doctor, who didn’t wish to give his name says, adding that a more modern
method — phacoemulsification — runs to $300 —350.
The most well-known techniques of pacoemulsification surgery are
extracapsular and introcapsular surgery. In extracapsular surgery
ultrasound may be used to soften and break up the cloudy lens so that it
can be removed through a narrow hollow tube. A thin “capsule” or shell
is left behind after cleaning up of the entire opaque cataract. In
intracapsular surgery the entire lens is removed, including the capsule.
The clinic has recently moved to larger, more modern offices in Nasimi
District and is currently working to open a new clinic in Masazir, 16
kilometers northeast of Baku. Randall says the clinic will help them to
better access people in rural areas. CCP is currently working with
international donors to get financial backing for the clinic. “We are
seeking about half a million dollars for this project,” he says.
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© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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