About the Program

In 2002 The Foundation opened a program office in New Zealand with the goal of extending its work in the Pacific from Melanesia to Fiji and Polynesia.

There are over 80,000 people in the Pacific region who are still living with unnecessary blindness, over 70% due to cataract, and 240,000 who suffer significant visual impairment that affects their daily lives.  With small populations spread over large areas of land, treatment is often difficult. 

At the inaugural Pacific Eye Care Workshop, organised by The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ and held in May 2003, the major barriers to better eye care throughout the Pacific were identified as:

• A lack of eye care nurses
• Under-resourcing of clinics and equipment
• Little community health promotion
• A lack of effective cost recovery and cost sharing initiatives to help distribute the burden of funding between governments, donors and patients

Very few countries had, to date, undertaken a national planning approach to developing eye care programs. For this, and other reasons, eye health was consistently afforded a very low priority. This workshop resulted in the commitment by participants to developing national eye care plans across the region.

Training is the cornerstone of The Foundation's work in the Pacific. Over 75 ophthalmologists and 300 eye nurses need to be trained to support eye care services in the region. To address this need, The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ established The Pacific Eye Institute in 2006, based centrally in Fiji.

The Pacific Eye Institute is the first and only regional training centre for Pacific eye health workers, providing high quality courses devised specifically for conditions in developing countries. The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ has devised the courses, established the teaching staff and overseen recruitment of students. 

The Institute, which will coordinate eye education throughout the Pacific region, will train desperately needed eye doctors and nurses appropriately and will support students with equipment and on-going education when they return to their home countries to restore sight.

The Pacific Eye Institute is led by Dr John Szetu who helped establish, with The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ, a successful National Eye Care Program in Vanuatu.

The Pacific Regional Blindness Prevention Program is in part supported by a New Zealand Agency for International Development (NZAid) five year grant.

As part of the Pacific Regional Blindness Prevention Program, several regional workshops have been held for eye doctors and nurses practicing in the Pacific region.

These workshops, held annually, allow doctors, nurses and technicians from across the region to share information and knowledge and to upgrade their skills.  They provide valuable networking support, particularly to nurses who often work alone in isolated locations and, in countries such as Niue and the Cook Islands, are often the country's only eye worker and manage the entire eye care program, from screening patients and identifying cases for the visiting eye surgeon, to organising 'outreach' tours of schools and outer islands and establishing a spectacle recovery program to ensure a steady supply of new spectacles.

The Pacific Eye Care Workshop in Vanuatu in 2005 and Fiji in 2006 brought together doctors to train them in small incision cataract surgery, to develop their research skills and to provide an opportunity to visit The Foundation's program in Vanuatu.

The Eye Nurses Workshop in the Cook Islands in 2004 and Fiji in 2006 combined a 'Train the Trainers' program with a primary eye care course, which were both delivered by the International Centre for Eyecare Education.

The eye nurse trainers put their skills into practice immediately by delivering primary eye care training to public health nurses.

Nurses who are competent in basic eye care are essential for the Pacific region, as they deliver much of the eye care services to the smaller populations in many of the Pacific islands, along with general health care.