The Southampton- Kenya Eye Link is part of the Vision 2020 Global initiative. Some of the projects key objectives are:

• To prevent avoidable blindness
  
• To improve the quality of services to vision impaired people
• To improve the training available to professional providing advice and services
• To raise public awareness of the issues and problems relating to sight loss

The Eastern Coast forms a significant part of Kenya, with a population of 4 million; the main city is Mombasa, a hub port for much of Africa.

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The Story so far......

In 2009 the Eastern Kenyan Coastal Caucus was formed between The Light House, The Coast, The Lyons and the Kwale district hospital to support and unify delivery of Ophthalmic care to Eastern Kenya.

In early 2011 the Caucus invited Southampton General Hospital to form a link with them to see if we could help them to improve their services through sharing our expertise and training their dedicated teams

.......First visit November 2011

Mr Richard Newsom

Led by Mr Richard Newsom, Consultant Ophthalmologist a team of 8 visited the hospitals to establish the need and how we could help achieve the vision2020 goals.

The teams included:

• Mr Richard Newsom - Consultant Ophthalmologist
• Mr Aby Jacob - Consultant Ophthalmologist
• Mr Roger Humphrey - Consultant Ophthalmologist
• Mr Andrew Talbot - Theatre manager
• Ms Jocelyn Cherry - Ophthalmologist
• Ms Jane Hayward - senior trust manager

This visit was very fruitful, the team were able to meet everyone, see their needs, help set up donated equipment as well as providing training in laser, retinal disease and glaucoma surgery.

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What next..... March 2014

There is much more to do... We have know identified important areas where we next hope to make a difference.

• Teach them how to assess childrens eyes, being able to prescribe glasses for them and treat common conditions
• Help them be able to organise their operating theatres to maximise the use of their limited resources
• Show them how to help people with very little vision.
• Train them in the management to common blinding eye conditions for example, diabetic eye disease
• Help them to be able to recognise the early signs of glaucoma, preventing vision loss form this blinding condition

Our next visit in in March 2014, with your help, the following people will make this happen...

How your donation helps.....

We strongly believe this project can make a big difference to the Ophthalmic care of the Kenyan people.The majority of our team are self funded,giving up their leave to make this work. Your money helps the following

• Crucial team members to come who otherwise couldn't afford to and who without the training wouldn't be possible
• Key equipment that makes an essential difference to eye care
• To be able to enable the Kenyan teams to come and see us in Southampton, so that they can see what we are training them to do in practice.

This project comes under Southampton Hospital Charity.
Charity Registration Number: 1051543

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