Regional Eye Care Partnerships
Antigua & Barbuda
Since 2019, CVRS|TEH has been providing surgical services to the people of Antigua and Barbuda at their local hospital. This partnership with the Ministry of Health & The Environment, Antigua and Barbuda is key to the collaborative approach required to reduce avoidable blindness in the Caribbean Region.
More than 600 surgeries have been done so far and during each visit, education sessions are held for ophthalmic professionals and other medical practitioners teaching them strategies to care for common eye problems.
Many families are often forced to outsource their eyecare and incur additional expenses to travel to Trinidad to get the surgery they need. Through this partnership, the doctors from CVRS|TEH fly to Antigua to perform surgeries, thus saving families the additional expense of travelling to Trinidad.
St. Lucia
In July 2021, ophthalmologist Dr. Dharmendra Shah from St. Lucia, signed a partnership with CVRS|TEH to perform cataract surgeries for some of his patients in St. Lucia.
The first surgery trip was done in November 2022. This was CVRS|TEH’s travelling surgery team’s first time visiting St. Lucia to perform cataract surgery, however, it was an exciting opportunity to help more people in need, to see again.
More than 30 surgeries have been done in only 2 visits. Plans for more visits with the addition of retina surgery are ongoing.
Eye care providers like Dr. Shah are embracing the opportunity to collaborate and form strategic partnerships to provide cataract surgery services in an unconventional way. In this post-pandemic era, with extraordinarily high waiting lists for cataract surgery, the benefits of collaboration have increased and CVRS|TEH understands the importance of participating in the solution.
Dominica
On November 2022, together with one of Dominica’s leading Consultant Ophthalmologist Dr. Hazel Shillingford-Ricketts, CVRS|TEH embarked on a partnership to provide surgical services to persons in Dominica. This service enables citizens to access high quality eye surgery without the need to travel outside of Dominica. Surgery trips began in 2023, with 83 surgeries done over 2 visits. This partnership, unlike most other our regional partnerships, the CVRS|TEH travelling surgery team actually travels with a state-of-the-art portable machine which Dr. Bhola uses to perform the surgeries. This revolutionary portable machine creates many opportunities for smaller Caribbean nations to access the eye care they need.
