Guatemala Brillando

Visualiza’s Permanent Local Network to Cure Treatable Blindness

Glasses break; recycled eyeglasses don’t work most of the time; medications need to be refilled; and eye trauma happens 52 weeks a year – not just when mission teams arrive.

We started our work in 1997 with eye care missions in Guatemala’s remote Peten Rainforest.

We quickly learned that well-intentioned efforts of volunteer teams can create a culture of dependence and undermine the prospect of permanent, sustainable, high-quality local eye care.

In Guatemala only 20 percent of all Guatemalan patients can pay for eye care; 70 percent can pay for some; and 10 percent can’t pay at all.

To give every patient the highest quality of care regardless of their ability to pay, we determined the volume of care needed to be self-sufficient.

From 28 years of lessons learned and challenges overcome our Visualiza professionals know:

• 13,000 patients, 660 surgeries, 3,996 prescription sales, and 996 more medical procedures every year make each Visualiza Eye Care Hospital self-supporting.
• 5,280 patients, 240 surgery referrals, and 3,000 prescription sales every year make each Vision Center supporting those Eye Care Hospitals sustainable.

To date we’ve used this knowledge to turn an early rainforest clinic with occasional mobile support into a network of four self-sustaining centralized Eye Care Hospitals with 16 supporting Vision Centers.

We’ve recruited, trained, and employed more than 380 local medical, administrative, and support staff who now serve over 150,000 patients every year, regardless of their ability to pay.