LV Prasad Eye Institute

View of Hyderabad from the LVP Eye Institute

We paid our first visit to the Eye Institute on Feb. 5. It is a very impressive facility that includes the optometry school, a hospital that provides medical training and a very impressive research facility. Photography inside the facility is not allowed, so there are no photos (go here to learn about the Institute - http://www.lvpei.org/).

There are three LV Prasad campuses. Hyderabad is the main campus. Over the past two decades the LVPI network has seen over 4 million patients and performed close to 400,000 eye surgeries with over 50% of these services being performed totally free to those less privileged. It is now the leading eye care centre for provision and comprehensive, high quality eye care services in this part of the world. LVPEI is a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Prevention of Blindness. You just cannot imagine how many people we saw in the waiting rooms, exam and post surgery rooms. One Ophthalmologist told us he sees 200 patients a day!

Shrikant introduced us to many of his colleagues and then handed us to Ganesh, the research administrator for the facility. Ganesh explained to us how not one person who needs care is turned away. If you have no money, you don’t have to pay. If you are poor, but have some money, you are charged a minimum. If you are in the middle, you pay a middle price. If you are very wealthy, you pay the premium price (how this is determined seems to be a little vague!). There is no government-subsidized health care, like Medicare/Medicaid in the US. A general eye exam costs roughly $5 US. Ganesh pointed out that many people from other wealthy countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, as well as some European countries come here for eye surgeries. Their reputation is THAT GOOD. The Institute gets major support from many outside individuals as well as major global companies and foundations like Alcon, Carl Zeiss, Sun Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Biomedix, Bausch & Lomb, etc. We were very impressed by what we learned and by all of the Dr’s and staff we spoke to. Shrikant is very lucky to have found such a wonderful group of people to work with and in such a fantastic facility.

Rowan will be lecturing and teaching a course at the institute while she is here. It is an exciting prospect that she is looking forward to. The exposure to seeing so many people with eye conditions that we just don’t see in the US is going to be an invaluable learning experience for both of us.