"While the plane has continued its mission virtually over the past two years, this is an unmistakable sign of hope, a chance to pick up where we left off and an opportunity to apply new innovations to our fight against avoidable blindness."Īlcon, through its charitable donation foundations Alcon Foundation and Alcon Cares, has been a generous supporter of Orbis for over forty years, providing monetary donations and state-of-the-art ophthalmic equipment, surgical products, and supplies for Orbis's Flying Eye Hospital and partner hospitals around the world. "When the pandemic broke out in March 2020, we had to make the difficult decision to cancel the second half of a training we were delivering in Fort Worth in partnership with Alcon, so we could not think of a more fitting place for the Flying Eye Hospital to return to in-person programming," said Derek Hodkey, president and CEO of Orbis International. This helps ensure ongoing continuity of and local access to eye care in their home countries. Participants will also learn to treat other conditions that threaten vision, including glaucoma, the most common cause of irreversible blindness.Ī select group of these participants, who are already highly experienced ophthalmologists, will also participate in a train-the-trainer course, which will deepen their ability to train the next generation of eye care professionals.
Cataracts remain the leading cause of blindness worldwide 2 despite being treatable with an operation that can take as little as ten to fifteen minutes. Learning surgical skills for cataract removal will be a major focus of the training. Simulation training allows the visiting eye care teams to grow their confidence in a training environment before moving on to real-life surgical procedures. The participants will hone their skills using cutting-edge ophthalmic surgical simulation training technology on the Flying Eye Hospital, which is currently at Fort Worth Alliance Airport, and additional hands-on training in the Alcon Experience Center (AEC), a training facility on Alcon's nearby campus.
Over a two-week period, Orbis's clinical staff and volunteer faculty along with Alcon bioengineers and trainers will share their knowledge with nearly 50 ophthalmologists, ophthalmology residents, nurses and biomedical engineers from several countries throughout the Caribbean, 1 helping them build skills to fight avoidable blindness in their communities. Orbis International, with support from Alcon, on August 8 will kick off its first in-person training project on board the Flying Eye Hospital – a fully accredited ophthalmic teaching hospital on board a plane – since the pandemic began.