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This week: Fred Hollows Foundation
Jim Carey introduced Helen Sorenson who told the meeting about her work with the Fred Hollows Foundation, Fred Hollows himself and his work and achievements.
One of New Zealand's great eye specialists, Fred Hollows, was born in New Zealand in 1928. As a young man, he studied theology at a bible college in Dunedin, intending to become a pastor. However, he determined to qualify as an opthalmologist, this being a more direct way, as he saw it, to express his deeply felt humanitarian instincts. Early on, Fred was exposed to New Zealand's easy access to the outdoors with which he fell in love, both hiking and skiing around nearby Mt Cook.
After training first at Otago University and then in the UK, Fred was appointed Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of NSW. On taking an interest in the Indigenous Community in nearby Redfern, he was shocked at their chronic and serious eye disorders. He galvanised his colleagues to establish a special clinic to address this endemic problem.
Later, as the ‘explorer’ in him took him into outback expeditions, beginning with his much loved town of Bourke, he was again shocked at the widespread eye disorders amongst indigenous Australians. Again, he established clinics with qualified eye surgeons to redress the major problem of cataract blindness. He, himself, performed thousands of cataract operations. Following the insertion of artificial lenses, the patient would be back at work within three days, leading a normal working life.
Fred was always controversial. According to his widow, Gabi, he meant many things to different people. He was a husband, a father, a friend, a skilled opthalmologist and, for a few politicians and bureaucrats, an irritating thorn in their side.
Under the auspices of the Fred Hollows Foundation, temporary surgical ‘camps’ have been established in 19 countries from South Africa to Pakistan. A surgical team will perform scores of procedures in a week in some remote location. Permanent eye institutes have been established in Nepal and Eritrea, staffed mostly by women. Lenses are manufactured here, with the object of reducing the cost of a single operation to just $25.
The Hollows Foundation is growing worldwide. In 2009, some 195,000 procedures were performed with a staff of 5900; in 2008, some 176,000 procedures were performed with a staff of 5200.
Fred died just 17 years ago from an incurable cancer. But his legacy of restoring sight to the blind lasts on in many countries..
Owen Tassicker.
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