Mobile eye-care unit boosts outreach to underserved patients.
RAWALPINDI:
Al-Shifa Trust’s community outreach programmes reached more than 665,000 patients in the financial year 2024-25, while the organisation also launched a mobile operation theatre developed in collaboration with Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL) to provide free eye surgeries in remote communities where fixed hospitals remain inaccessible.
While briefing media, President of Al-Shifa Trust Maj. Gen. (Retd) Rehmat Khan said that the Al-Shifa Centre for Community Ophthalmology (ACCO), set up over 1,400 eye camps, screened more than 420,000 patients and 244,000 schoolchildren for vision defects, and performed 13,777 surgeries, mostly cataract procedures in one year.
It also screened over 38,000 patients for hypertension and diabetes, reflecting a widening scope beyond ophthalmology, he added.
He informed that the newly commissioned mobile theatre comprises two specialised truck units. The first houses a generator, sterilisation equipment, and pre-operative facilities. The second expands into a full operating environment with two surgical tables, allowing surgeons to operate simultaneously and perform up to 100 surgeries per day.
MD of OGDCL Ahmed Hayat Lak said the company has sponsored 160 surgical camps since 2017, enabling 28,000 surgeries, treating 260,000 patients, and screening 75,000 schoolchildren.
General Manager ACCO Dr. Hafiz Muhammad Najam-ul-Hasnat said over the past 25 years, ACCO has conducted approximately 150,000 surgeries across all four provinces as well as AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan. In FY 2024-25, the programme expanded internationally for the first time, serving 5,632 beneficiaries and performing more than 400 cataract operations in Somalia, with plans to extend services to Afghanistan and East Africa.
Following the 2025 monsoon floods, ACCO teams also reached more than 32,000 affected people in KPK and north and south Punjab, distributing medicines, glasses, and hygiene kits.
About 26 million people in Pakistan live with vision impairment, including 1.5 million who are blind and more than 3 million children facing preventable sight loss. Nearly 90 percent live in low-income areas with limited access to care.
Pakistan has only 15 ophthalmologists, five optometrists, and nine allied ophthalmic personnel per million people, highlighting the scale of unmet need and the limits of charity-driven models without sustained public health investment.
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