I have visited a lot of hospitals and seen numerous surgeries performed throughout high school and college around Philadelphia. I even had the opportunity to see a cataract surgery performed in Bryn Mawr Hospital. Usually the average cataract surgery lasts 1-2 hours, requires a full operating room staffed with 3 or 4 nurses and an ophthalmologist. That is most certainly not the case at Aravind.

Aravind has about 10-12 operating rooms in their main hospital. On any given day, four or so may be dedicated solely to performing cataract surgery. In each operating room there are usually two operations going on, which means two doctors are stationed in each operating room. The doctors’ sole task is to perform the surgery. Everything from the patient arriving at the hospital, to getting gowned and showing up at the operating room is organized and operated by other staff within the hospital. This makes the system extremely efficient. The magic amount of time it takes for each surgery: 10 minutes.

Each physician will probably perform 50-100 surgeries in a given day. This is kind of amazing, especially considering they need to perform more surgeries due to the influx of patients from both Madurai and outside the city from their eye camps.

These operating rooms are pristine too, they have the latest technology (Alcon’s latest phaco-machine) and everyone is in the proper attire, which I cannot say for in the US- there have been numerous reports and studies that claim hospital staff within the US are not following the proper protocol for attire and hygiene.

I had the chance to watch several cataract surgeries along with seeing a cyst removal from a patient’s eye. Overall I was extremely impressed by their operating room layout and organization of hospital resources.

On another note, one of the more interesting organizations I have been reading about while I was in India is ENABLE. It is an open community that creates prosthetic limbs for children using 3D printers. Because children are constantly growing, children who are missing limbs need replacements to keep up with their growing bodies. This means a lot of money is spent on prosthetics especially as a child. 3D printer technology is a possible solution. It is extremely cheap to create prosthetics with a 3D printer, it just requires experienced engineers and doctors working together. As I have been working in Aurolab, I noticed they had a 3D printer available and one of the other interns at Aurolab also has experience with 3D printer technology. So both of us will be working together to try to get prosthetics to children in India who are in need.

I unfortunately cannot upload picture from my room in Madurai thanks to the slow wifi. I should have some upload later this week when I get access to my work computer. Next week I want to dedicate a post to my awesome visit to the eye camps here in Madurai! Stay tuned!!!