Q&A: Cure Blindness Project expands reach to prevent blindness

Key takeaways:

• Cure Blindness Project works in 30 countries in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America.
• Since its founding, the organization with partners has performed 1.6 million surgeries and 16.5 million screenings.

Nearly 30 years after the organization’s founding, Cure Blindness Project, previously known as Himalayan Cataract Project and HCP Cureblindness, continues to fight preventable blindness in underserved parts of the world.

The organization underwent a name change in 2024 and is ramping up efforts to spread awareness of and involvement in its mission.

K-T Overbey, CEO of Cure Blindness Project, spoke with Healio about the organization’s goals for the near future and how it hopes to achieve them.

Healio: Your organization underwent a rebrand in 2024. What was the thinking behind that change?

Overbey: Our organization was originally founded as Himalayan Cataract Project, and that was the initial focus. But in the almost 30 years that we have been around, our work has expanded far beyond the Himalayans and just cataracts, with a focus on curing all avoidable blindness. As we look to our future, we felt that rebranding as Cure Blindness Project was a better representation of who we are and where we are going. We certainly will continue to build upon our history and our tradition, of which we are proud, but we wanted to be more clear about our mission.

Healio: How has the organization’s mission changed over the years, and where is that mission expanding?

Overbey: The mission has not changed, and we are still absolutely committed to ending avoidable blindness in the world. Where it has evolved, however, is the scope of where we are working. We are now working in more than 30 countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and we have just entered South America for the first time. The breadth of how we are training people has evolved, and the focus of the services we provide is looking at a much broader array of causes of avoidable blindness.

Healio: What are some of the long-term goals for the organization, and what strategies are you using to achieve them?

Overbey: Our vision is to see an end of avoidable blindness in the world. We believe that the right ways to go about that are not just providing direct care and enabling that care but also building up long-term systems of care. That is why we focus on training and equipping those whom we have trained so that we are thinking about the sustainability of our work.

Another area that we are committed to is quality. It is important that we are not just talking about the number of surgeries but rather the number of people who can see well. Quality has always been a cornerstone of our work, but we are focusing on it even more as we go forward as we use it as the cornerstone of our training programs and our measurement of any work that we are sponsoring.

The third area is ensuring that we are thinking about comprehensive care. We will continue to enable direct care in our historical expertise areas of cataract and cornea, which are the two leading causes of avoidable blindness. But as we think about training and partnering with other organizations, we want to make sure that no matter what the issue is for the patient, we can help them get care. If someone shows up, they don’t know if they have a cataract or if they have glaucoma or need glasses — they just know that they cannot see. Our mission is focused on helping them see, and if it is not something that we directly enable care in, we want to make sure that we are partnered with somebody who can provide that care.

As we look ahead, some of those strategies are intended to provide a significant increase in our impact. Over the next several years, we are targeting to train as many as 14,000 people. That includes doctors, nurses and ophthalmic personnel. We want to ensure that more than 80% of our partners are properly equipped so that they are ready to provide quality care where they are. We are looking at screening 3 million people and performing 600,000 surgeries, which translates to impacting a significant increase in terms of people who currently today do not have any care.

Healio: What role does the Global Partners Program play in your future goals?

Overbey: The Global Partners Program is a wonderful opportunity for ophthalmologists, primarily in the U.S., to get involved with our mission. There are a couple of ways they can do that. We have an outstanding network of clinicians who help us in terms of training. Sometimes they go to other countries and do surgeries, but the focus there is on coaching local clinicians as opposed to just going over, doing the surgeries and leaving. The Global Partners Program enables them to have their practices contribute through either a direct donation or by getting their patients involved. Both raise awareness of the impact of this project around the world.

Most people do not realize that something that is common here like cataract surgery is almost impossible to access in many other parts of the world. That is why 90% of avoidable blindness is in low-income countries. The Global Partners Program has projects where for every cataract it does, it will donate a certain amount or enable their grateful patients to make a contribution and get involved to sponsor somebody else’s surgery overseas.

So many people are just not aware of the breadth of these issues around the world and the impact that they have on someone’s life. It is about so much more than doing a surgery. It is about a child being able to stay in school and change the structure of their life. It is about an adult who can now go back to work and support their family. Vision has an impact on an individual and full communities in terms of their economics and the cycle of poverty, not to mention personal safety, road safety and things like that. We want to raise awareness of not only the prevalence of the issue but the impact of the issue.

For more information:

K-T Overbey, of Cure Blindness Project, can be reached at info@cureblindness.org.

Published by:

Read more about

This post was originally published on this site