A little girl receiving eye treatment by volunteer faculty and local doctors during a project in Mongolia

Our work in Mongolia

In Mongolia, access to high quality, affordable eye care services is limited in both urban and rural areas. Lack of equipment, training and infrastructure are major barriers to adequate care and there is no comprehensive framework to treat children’s eye disease.

Success in Mongolia

The Flying Eye Hospital first landed in Mongolia in 1989. In 2014, Orbis launched a four-year project with the National Centre for Maternal and Child Health (NCMCH), the main provider of children’s eye care in the country, and five county-level hospitals in rural Mongolia. The project aims to establish a model for comprehensive vision care that provides services from basic vision screening to the management of more complex paediatric eye disorders.

Sudheer Sukumar providing treatment to a patient, colleagues in scrubs behind him

We've been working in Mongolia since 1989

Your support has helped us to screen more than 97,000 children in schools, communities and hospitals to date, including more than 1,000 babies who have been screened for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) at the NCMCH.

In 2019 alone, we delivered:

As a result of our ongoing advocacy work, we’ve helped make paediatric eye health a priority for Mongolia’s policymakers and the Ministry of Health. The second annual Child Sight Day was celebrated this past September.

Cataracts are the most common cause of blindness followed by glaucoma. Mongolia is also facing an epidemic of diabetic retinopathy (DR), a potentially blinding condition associated with diabetes.

What We're Doing Next

We are continuing to work with the National Centre for Maternal and Child Health and county-level hospitals to train critically needed eye health professionals – from nurses to conduct school-based vision screenings to ophthalmologists to perform, strabismus and other surgical procedures. We’re also continuing to provide essential eye care equipment and instruments to the NCMCH.

Orbis will also continue to advocate for better eye care services and eye health awareness and work with policymakers to address still unmet needs, like access to refraction screening and to corrective lenses, particularly for children in Mongolia.

Partners

  • National Center for Maternal and Child Health (NCMCH)
  • Mongolia Ministry of Health
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