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.

Many Hands

India is certainly the land of ‘Can I help you?’. With 1.17 billion people here, that means there are many, many pairs of hands to do anything and everything for you. Any kind of service industry job has 3 or 4 times the people to do it as we do in the States. For instance, we went out to dinner last night and we had a waiter to take our order, a bus boy to take dirty things away, a person to pull our chairs out for us and bring extra plates, utensils & water, and a server who put food on each of our plates from the dishes we were sharing. We had 4 people to service our table, and each table in the place had that kind of personal service.

Many people here have a maid that comes every day to clean the house. Our maid's name is Meena (see photo of Jenni & Meena). You can hire a person to do your grocery shopping, to drive you anywhere you want to go, to cook for you, to clean your toilets or to carry anything for you. Shrikant had a banker from a local bank come meet us at the Eye Institute to change some traveler’s checks into Rupees for us. It was great how he came in with this big case of money and we did our business right outside Shrikant's office. No need to go to the bank if they will come to you! When we were shopping for Indian clothes the other day (see Jenni in one of her

new Kurtas!) the service was amazing. This country is really working hard to put its many people to work. Explains why the middle class is growing so rapidly. I decided to get into using my hands too. A load of laundry sounded like a good place to start and I learned that I am the first cycle in the process. The clothes are first scrubbed and soaked in a bucket and then put into the washer for finishing and spinning. Then, everything is hung outside to dry.

Now that we have been here a while we are feeling more confident out on the streets by ourselves, so we decided to venture out on our own today. We walked to the Eye Institute (just over a mile) to meet up with our driver. Shrikant has arranged for us to have a driver take us wherever we would like to go. A very nice man who speaks little English (this will be fun!) took us on our first food-shopping spree without Shrikant & Charanya. We helped direct our driver to take us to the Q Market. This is where most Americans and Europeans do their shopping as they stock products from our parts of the world. Rowan was delighted to find peanut butter and Scottish apricot jelly (the breakfast of champions!). We spent about $3000 rupees ($60 US) and came out of there with 6 bags of groceries. When we returned to our waiting car, the driver jumped out to assist the man who carried our things out in getting everything in the car. Now came the fun part. I jumped in the front seat of the car with the driver (we think he was Muslim and were not quite sure if a woman should be up front with him. Oh well). I was trying to explain that I would help give him directions back to the apartment. He appeared to know the English words for right and left so that was a blessing. It was just after 5pm, so you can imagine the traffic and chaos. Its like an E Ticket ride at Disneyland! We did great on our first day out alone in this huge city. Can’t wait to get out for our next adventure………….