Bisauli Eye Hospital

Bisauli Eye Hospital

Paul Hirst, from Kettering Huxloe, together with his wife, participated in the National Immunisation Day in India last November and was present at the inauguration of the Bisauli Eye Hospital in Utter Pradesh, which our two Clubs helped to fund with a Global Rotary Foundation Grant.  He has sent the following brief report, Also included are some photographs sent by Ravi Agarwal of the Bisauli Rotary Club.

"We were able to see for ourselves the transformation of a bare building into a small hospital with, as best as we could determine, all the equipment that was on the schedule. There are now five rooms in the hospital, one for operating, including a small anti-room; one for storing the dressings and containing the auto-claves; a post-op room with 8 beds; a consulting room for eye tests and a waiting room.

Operations were taking place while we were there and the general impression gained of the patients were that they were poor, poorlyy clothed and mostly an older generation, as you would expect for cataract problems.

There were two doctors on site, one performing eye tests using equipment that I knew to be as modern as my optician uses, and the other performing operations in the small operating room.  The waiting room had a small queue waiting to be seen and in the post-op room all beds were used by patients that had been operated on, accompanied by some of their families.

The opening was attended by the great and good, from the local mayor to one of the state VIPs, who was attended by a full military escort. Most of the ceremony was in Hindi, but all of us who had been on the NID locally were treated as guests of honour."