AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CATARACT AND REFRACTIVE SURGERY FOUNDATION

Description

More than 85 million people are visually impaired worldwide. Globally, cataracts are the second leading cause of visual impairment and the leading cause of preventable blindness in the developing world.

The ASCRS Foundation supports physician education and provides humanitarian cataract surgery in the United States and overseas. Through its programs and partnerships, the Foundation works to maximize the benefits of modern ophthalmology and to treat thousands of patients in need each year.

The Foundation's US-based charitable cataract surgery program serves financially vulnerable, uninsured Americans who cannot afford or access care. These members of our own communities often rely on others to complete daily tasks and if left untreated, risk debilitating vision loss. To date, Operation Sight has delivered more than 4,200 surgeries through a nationwide network of volunteer surgeons committed to caring for those with no other options.

The Foundation also seeks to address not just individual cases of cataract blindness, but to fight the root cause; the shortage of eye surgeons in the developing world. The solution is two-fold: create world-class medical centers where efficient doctors can establish a presence, like the Sinskey Eye Institute; and secondly to focus on education - raising the local standards for both patient care and physician training.