YOU might think that planes merely ship freight and take you to and from your favorite vacation spot. But for ORBIS – a nonprofit, humanitarian organization focused on curing blindness – the plane serves a greater purpose.
Their wide-bodied DC-10 aircraft has been transformed into a medical center called the Flying Eye Hospital, outfitted with an operating room, a recovery room, and a classroom to teach physicians from around the world how to prevent and treat blindness.
According to the World Health Organization, 37 million people worldwide are blind – yet 28 million of them don’t have to be. Their blindness could have been prevented, or their eyesight restored, if only they’d had access to proper eye care.
The highly specialized ORBIS plane is packed with equipment, along with volunteer eye doctors that include experts in cataract surgery, corneal transplantation, retinal surgeons, pediatric ophthalmologists, and plastic surgeons.
The plane flies to developing countries, where 90 percent of the blind reside – in the past, this has included China, India, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Myanmar – and it’s then parked and set up as a functioning hospital for around three weeks. Local physicians can bring in pre- screened patients for examination and surgery.
Although treating those chosen patients is important, the main focus of ORBIS is to provide hands-on training to local physicians so they can continue helping their community long after the Flying Eye Hospital has hit the skies.
With that in mind, the plane is set up with cameras, microphones and video monitors so local doctors sitting in the plane’s classroom can not only watch the surgery being performed in the operating room but also ask questions during the actual operation.
“Then we go into their own hospitals and the local doctors would get similar patients [who required eye surgery], but this time I am on the assistant side of the operating table and they are the primary surgeon,” explains Dr. Jack Dodick, professor and chairman of the department of ophthalmology at New York University School of Medicine. “They mimic what I have done. The purpose of the program is to teach and transfer skills.” Dodick was on the maiden voyage of the Flying Eye Hospital into China in 1986.
“That was very exciting,” he recalls. “We were going into a country where at the time US-China relationships were very lukewarm. I operated on the airplane, performing a corneal transplant on a Chinese military man. This was very rarely done in China.”
ORBIS’ next goal is to provide technology that simulates surgery so surgeons can train outside the operation room – think virtual reality surgery – “much like a pilot in flight simulation,” says Dodick. NYU is currently a testing site for simulated surgery to help validate how effective the technology is.
Dr. Julie Nam, an phthalmology resident at NYU, flew with the organization to Cambodia last December.
“We brought the simulator to Cambodia and we taught some residents and physicians there on it,” says Nam. “They were ncredibly appreciative. You felt like there wasn’t enough you could do for them. I gave them any piece of equipment I’d brought – magnifying glasses and surgical loops – since we’re so fortunate here.”
Adds odick, “ORBIS is a good humanitarian project. It transcends politics. It’s about helping people.”