Aravind Eye Care System – Eye(I) care for the poor!

Established in 1976 with the mission to eliminating needless blindness, Aravind is the largest and most productive eye care facility in the world. Taking its compassionate services to the doorstep of rural India, Aravind’s stunningly effective strategies vaulted barriers of distance, poverty and ignorance to create a self-sustaining system. From April 2006 to March 2007, including the work done in the Managed Eye Hospitals, over 2.3 million out patients were treated and over 270,444 surgeries were performed.

Aravind Eye Care System is the largest and most productive eye care facility in the world, in terms of surgical volume and the number of patients treated. Today the Aravind Eye Care System encompasses five hospitals, three managed eye hospitals, a manufacturing center for ophthalmic products, an international research foundation and a resource and training center that is revolutionizing hundreds of eye care programs across the developing world.

Founded in 1976 by Dr. G. Venkataswamy, Aravind Eye Care System today is the largest and most productive eye care facility in the world. From April 2007 to March 2008, about 2.4 million persons have received outpatient eye care and over 285,000 have undergone eye surgeries at the Aravind Eye Hospitals at Madurai, Theni, Tirunelveli, Coimbatore and Puducherry.

Blending traditional hospitality with state-of-the-art ophthalmic care, Aravind offers comprehensive eye care in the most systematic way attracting patients from all around the world.

Our effort is to make Aravind an instrument of the Divine Will. We strive to forget our limitations and work with the direction of the Divine Will, not in a vain superficial way but with a deep commitment and faith that guidance comes from a higher level of consciousness. Then one is able to work with the great confidence that comes only with that faith and realization that we are all part of a spiritual capacity or spiritual power. It is then that all of nature works with you. You don’t feel that you are a superior being but you are an instrument in the hands of a higher force and it is in that spirit that we meet our day to day struggles and successes.

– Dr. G. Venkataswamy

Alternate Health Care: Aravind Model

Given the magnitude of blindness and the challenges faced in a developing country, the Government alone cannot meet the health needs of all. Realising this predicament, Dr. Venkataswamy wanted to establish an alternate health care model that would supplement the efforts of the Government and also be self-supporting.

Hence, upon his retirement in 1976, he established the GOVEL Trust to initiate eye care work.

Under this Trust, the Aravind Eye Hospitals were founded. Today, Aravind is more than an eye hospital. It is :

• a social organisation committed to the goal of elimination of needless blindness through comprehensive eye care services.
• an international training centre for ophthalmic professionals and trainees who come from within India and around the world to teach or to learn, to offer their skills and to acquire new ones.
• an institute for research that contributes to the development of eye care.
• an institute to train health-related and managerial personnel in the development and implementation of efficient and sustainable eye care programmes.
• a manufacturer of world class ophthalmic products available at affordable costs.

For more details please visit their website: http://www.aravind.org/

Support Aravind – http://www.friendsofaravind.org/