The Flying Eye Hospital first landed in Mongolia in 1989. In 2014, Orbis launched a four-year project with the National Centre for Maternal and Child Health (NCMCH), the main provider of children’s eye care in the country, and five county-level hospitals in rural Mongolia. The aim was to establish a model for comprehensive vision care that provides services from basic vision screening to the management of more complex paediatric eye disorders.
Since we started working in Mongolia hundreds of eye health professionals across the country have been trained to screen for, diagnose and treat eye conditions in babies and children. Conditions such as retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), an eye disease that can happen in premature babies. If not diagnosed early enough ROP can lead to blindness. Training has included the use of important diagnostic tests such as the red reflex test, a non-invasive test which can show early warning signs of serious eye conditions in children.