Returning to Thailand ten years after completing an Orbis training program in the country in 1982, Dr. Simon Holland was nervous. The Vancouver-based eye surgeon had been part of a team that visited the country to try to increase the capacity of Thai doctors to perform retina surgery. At the time, there were only two cities in the entire country where these types of procedures could be performed. The government of Thailand had invited Orbis to train more doctors in order to open provincial clinics across the country.
Now, ten years later, Holland was returning with auditors from the sponsoring agency to evaluate the results of that initial program, and he wasn’t sure what to expect. He had no reason to worry. At the very first provincial centre they visited, he walked into the operating room and found one of the doctors who had been trained a decade earlier in the process of training a Thai doctor on retina surgery.