What does the Fred hollows foundation?

Answer 1

An estimated 39 million people around the world today are blind. Four out of five don't have to be.

Simple interventions, such as inexpensive medication and surgery, can restore people's sight, productivity and livelihoods, giving lasting benefits for individuals, their families and whole communities.

Half of global blindness is caused by cataracts - a clouding of the lens of the eye that can be treated by a simple surgical procedure - and the World Bank has identified cataract surgery as one of the most cost-effective of all public health interventions.

The Foundation focuses on the comprehensive treatment of cataract blindness, but we also tackle other causes of blindness, including trachoma and refractive error.

Since its formation in 1992 The Foundation has helped restore sight to well over 1 million people.

The Fred Hollows Foundation is a large, Australia-based charity aiming to improve vision in the developing world. They primarily focus on cataracts, which cause a significant amount of preventable vision loss in the developing world.

The Fred Hollows Foundation funds a wide variety of eye care activities in Asia, Africa, and Australia. As members of the Vision 2020 initiative to end avoidable blindness by the year 2020, they seek to "strengthen national eye health systems." Toward this goal, funds they grant are intended to train surgeons, support staff, and community health workers in clinical eye care skills, upgrade and build facilities, provide equipment, and subsidize screenings and procedures, including cataract surgeries. The Fred Hollows Foundation also funds research and advocacy. The Fred Hollows Foundation ("FHF") is an Australia based non-government organization whose mission is to prevent and treat avoidable blindness in developing countries. FHF also works to improve the health outcomes of indigenous Australians.

Cataract blindness affects around 20 million people globally, who mostly live in developing countries. Yet, cataract blindness can be treated with a relatively simple operation using an intraocular lens (IOL). Unfortunately, the operation is not carried out in many poorer countries because it is too expensive.

An Australian doctor, Fred Hollows, decided to make intraocular lenses more affordable so that cataract operations could be performed more cost-effectively. To do this, FHF built laboratories in Eritrea and Nepal to produce IOL's and provide them to developing nations at a cost that is a fraction of commercially produced IOL's. Since 1992, FHF has also established programs in 29 countries to equip and train local doctors to perform modern cataract surgery. Through these skills training programs and the provision of equipment and IOL's, FHF has helped restore the sight of more than 1,000,000 people worldwide.