Dr. Cody Lo on the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital: Helping to Transform Eye Care in Ghana

When Dr. Cody Lo touched down in Ghana for an Orbis Flying Eye Hospital project in 2025, it was an opportunity to apply years of medical training in a global health setting. Lo, who has been an Orbis Future Vision Leader since the early days of the program, had long hoped to participate in a plane-based training project—working in global health is a personal passion, and one of the key reasons he had chosen ophthalmology as his area of specialty.

“As a medical student, I participated in a global health program where I spent a month in Taiwan on a health exchange. We worked with some of the local medical students in a rural area, touring different hospitals, giving talks to some of the local healthcare providers,” he explains. “Having that experience early on in medical school, I was a first-year med student at the time, really inspired me to make global health part of my career in some capacity.”

Stepping onto the Flying Eye Hospital in Ghana many years later felt like a dream coming true. It also felt like an opportunity to make a real difference in the healthcare experience of people living in that country.

“The overarching theme of our work in Ghana was to empower some of the local ophthalmologists and build capacity in their community,” Lo says. This meant he was able to teach the participants many of the skills he had been honing during his studies.

Now in his final year of training and having done nearly a thousand ophthalmic surgeries, Lo was accustomed to the common surgical techniques in Canada. In particular, cataract surgery done using phacoemulsification, which is more efficient with a faster healing process. But these innovations have only started to make their way to lower-income countries, like Ghana.

“One of the challenges is that even though they're getting access to the technologies, there aren't as many ophthalmologists who are trained on these techniques, so many of the ophthalmologists there are still doing extracapsular cataract surgery, which is the previous method. My role focused on teaching phacoemulsification, but other physicians on the mission focused on teaching skills like strabismus and glaucoma surgery,” says Lo, who was able to work not just with local ophthalmologists but also with trainees who will go on to become ophthalmologists.

He was able to use the hands-on simulation set-ups on the plane to walk participants through not just these new techniques but also ways to handle complications and complex scenarios. That, however, was not the end of the opportunity for training in the country.

“One of the things I'm most proud of from our work in Ghana is that we were able to acquire funding to donate two virtual reality simulators to one of the local teaching hospitals,” says Lo. “I think that will really leave a lasting legacy in the community.”

For Lo, the experience in Ghana was a reminder of why he had initially been interested in the work Orbis does. In medical school, he was asked to become the University Lead for the Orbis Future Vision Leaders program at the University of British Columbia, a role he enjoyed, and through that he was able to see Orbis International’s Vice President, Clinical Services and Technologies, Dr. Hunter Cherwek, speak about Orbis’s programs in communities around the globe.

The talk was inspiring and Lo hoped he might have the opportunity to be part of a program one day. Actually having that happen gave him even more understanding of the importance of this work.

“I felt like I already knew what Orbis did, but it was a completely different experience actually getting to see it in person and getting to contribute to some of the work they did in Ghana,” he says. “I was able to work with more than 20 ophthalmology trainees that were going to work not only in Accra, the city we were in, but who had come from all over Ghana to take part in the training. We were proud that some of the things we were able to teach these local ophthalmologists will have an impact all over Ghana, not just in the major city,” he says.

Lo is very grateful to the Orbis donors and supporters who make these programs possible. “Trainees like myself wouldn’t be able to go on these trips without those donors. And getting trainees interested in global ophthalmology early in their careers really helps set people up to continue this as part of their practice moving forward,” he says.