Sight Surgery International is a charitable organization that organizes and implements sight-restoring surgery clinics throughout the developing world, serving populations where blindness from cataracts is a scourge. Our volunteer team performs more than 1,200 surgeries per year. None of us receive any salary at SSI.
SSI provides professional skills support and training for local surgeons who may lack the resources to continue their medical education and improve their surgical skills. Didactic lectures, practice surgery and live surgery are tailored to the particular local surgeons’ needs and level of skill.
Surgical supplies are purchased
at cost from pharmaceutical companies such as Bausch and Lomb and Alcon (as well as many others) with whom SSI board members have had long standing working relationships.
We recruit volunteer surgeons
from economically developed as well as emerging countries to donate their time and professional skills to perform cataract surgeries in remote locales where eye care may never before have been provided
Your donation brings sight to life for
poor patients in the developing world.
- Current estimates are that cataracts blind over 25,000,000 people worldwide. If those people had access to a simple operation, their eyesight could be easily restored.
- Cataract surgery is a safe, predictable, and life-transforming procedure performed in less than 30 minutes under local anesthetic.
- The magnitude of the need for blindness remediation coupled with such a simple and inexpensive solution has catalyzed the SSI team to refine a truly responsive solution.
- Every 5 seconds someone in the world goes blind.
Sight Surgery International is a non-profit, humanitarian organization designed to recruit, coordinate, and deploy small teams of volunteer ophthalmologists, nurses and technicians to perform free sight restoring surgery throughout the United States and the emerging world.
Each person pays his or her own way and donates their professional skills. In a recent year, the ophthalmologic personnel examined thousands of needy patients and performed hundreds of major eye surgeries on people who would otherwise have remained blind or visually impaired.