Hello again from Maharashtra!
We are very happy to announce that we are closing in on our inauguration for our second Dekhon Centre - a comprehensive hospital located in a town of about 350,000, designed to treat the majority of cases of preventable blindness and to do so in a sustainable way. Dekhon Centres are our workhorses, performing the bulk of our Cataract surgeries, which are the primary cause of preventable blindness. Our pilot Dekhon Centre, located in the city of Washim, has performed nearly 1000 of these surgeries in the past year and a half. We hope that our second DC at Malkapur will be bigger and better, servicing a larger population and operated by trained locally sourced technical staff, operating with two consultants on site. Malkapur is a more industrial city than Washim, with a large minority of its population working in nearby processing facilities for fabric and seed. Industrial towns tend to have a higher incidence of eye problems given the nature of their work. Coupled with the lack of any eye care setup in the city, we hope to make a substantial impact on the people of Malkapur and the surrounding areas.
While we do not have a final opening date for the hospital, we believe that the construction should be completed within the next two weeks, after which we should be able to move in the equipment and start setting up for the inauguration. Below are some pictures of the hospital so you can get an idea of how far we have come!
We will keep you posted as things progress and we finalize a date for our second DC. In the mean-while, we are expecting some Outreach Centres to come online in the next month as well, fleshing out our Washim Cluster to provide next-door services to locals in nearby villages. More on that in our next post!
-The Dekhon Team.
