The former president of Ireland Mary Robinson and actor Ralph Fiennes visited RCSI today to launch Right to Sight, a new international sight-saving organisation.

Based at the RCSI, Right to Sight aims to eliminate the cataract crisis in Asia and Africa. It will do this through training surgeons in these regions to perform life-enhancing operations within their own community. In addition, Right to Sight will dispatch emergency surgical teams, in particular to Africa, to operate in outreach villages assisted by non-medical Right to Sight volunteers. Using this innovative ‘modus operandi’, it is hoped that a Right to Sight surgeon in an emergency team production line will be able to operate on up to 30,000 patients each year, up from a current average rate of 5,000 per annum. In global terms, this would increase the current average of 200 operations per million of population to 5,000 per million.

According to the organisation’s founder Dr Kate Coleman: “A cataract operation takes just 15 minutes to perform and the patient can see immediately after the operation, so the affect is like that of a miracle. This is a huge problem in Africa and Asia and using a strategic approach we hope to help take control of this crisis.”