Experience in eye-care & Development of Eye Hospital :

Nabarun Seva Niketan has been running an eye clinic especially for the poor eye patients since 1986 -87. During the period from 1992 to 2003, NSN organized eye camps in every year with the support from various national and international funding bodies and conducted free operations for more than 7000 eye patients by conventional method of surgery. In the year 2002-2003 the Govt. took a policy not to provide permission for surgery in temporary OT in camp site. Since then we initiated to properly upgrade our Eye clinic into an Eye Hospital. Recently We have constructed our eye hospital. Presently our building has four stories measuring altogether about 30,000sft covered area, with well equipped OPD, IPD, a modern OT and other required infrastructure supported by required medical , paramedical staff, eye surgeons etc.

To mobilize resources in the process of upgrading our hospital, we got active support from local individual donors for extension of the building. Some charitable trusts and many individual donors of Kolkata also extended their assistance. Local MLA provided support through Local Area Development fund of Govt. of W.B. In this process we got valuable grant assistance from the Consulate General of Japan- Kolkata, WBSEDCL and Consulate General  of the Federal Republic of Germany for procurement of various types of modern ophthalmic care equipments.

Most of the patients are rural based, mostly illiterate with a very low level of awareness on basic health care in general and in ophthalmic care in particular, physically and mentally weak, suffering mostly from cataract and other related diseases. So far their socio-economic background is concerned; most of the beneficiaries are living marginally over or below the poverty line, belong to the socio-economically weaker section of the society. They are dependant on the free eye camp surgeries. However a part of the patients also come from the lower–middle class or middle class background. 

Nabarun Seva Niketan has been working for last 3 decades in the field of ophthalmic care and has conducted several base- line studies during the eye camps. It has been observed that the most of the eye patients suffer from low vision due to cataract. Other than cataract cases, SSophthalmic refraction problem, Glaucoma, Terrisium, Sack, external infections are very common. This area is vulnerable for the eye infection due to the coal dust-polluted environment, created by the Kolaghat Thermal Power Station. Ash and coal dust coming out from six giant chimneys of this power plant is affecting the eyes of thousands of people staying with in the radious of 15 – 20 k.ms. Consequently people, especially the children are suffering from this kind of external eye infections.

The Govt. ophthalmic care facilities in the area are inadequate. Considering the catchments area of our programme being three blocks viz. Kolaghat, Panskura . Tamluk, each block has one PHC in the respective block to cover about 11 lakhs of population. Limited health care facilities are available in those block level PHCs. Although general treatment facilities are available yet the PHC doesn’t have any infrastructure for any critical eye treatment or ophthalmic surgery. There is only one district hospital, located in the district town Tamluk, which is more than 35 Km away from our project site. The Tamluk hospital has the infrastructure including eye treatment, but the hospital can provide only simple treatment or operations. Any critical treatment is referred to big hospitals of Kolkata. As there is no eye hospital within the radious of 30 kms the poor eye patients are solely dependant on our eye hospital for their ophthalmic treatment

The illiterate, weaker section of the rural community people are always comfortable in their own area rather than going to distant cities or town hospital as they do not know well about the city hospital and in many cases the travel cost to go to the  distant city hospital seems costly for them. Some of the private nursing homes are taking the advantage of the situation and commercially squeeze the patients. Helpless poor eye patients, who can’t afford to go to the private nursing homes, generally go to the rural quack physicians and unfortunately in many cases they loose their vision due to unscientific treatment of those quack doctors. The cataract affected needy patients of this area do not have the opportunity for operations unless the voluntary organization like Nabarun conducts free cataract surgeries.