Improving eye care in Mongolia

In Mongolia, access to high-quality, affordable eye care services is limited in both urban and rural areas. Lack of equipment, training, and infrastructure are major barriers to adequate care and there is no comprehensive framework to treat children’s eye disease.

Mongolia has one of the lowest cataract surgical rates in Asia – 1,400 per million people each year. Currently, 90% of all cataract surgeries are performed in the capital city, as out of 21 provinces only six have the capacity to conduct cataract surgery.

One in six schoolchildren is visually impaired and only 13% of ophthalmologists in the country can perform high-quality refraction and prescribe spectacles, all of which were trained on the last Flying Eye Hospital project in Mongolia.

Orbis launched a four-year project with the National Center for Maternal and Child Health, the main provider of children’s eye care in the country, and five county-level hospitals in rural Mongolia in 2014. The project helped develop a model for comprehensive vision care that provides services from basic vision screening to the management of more complex pediatric eye disorders like retinopathy of prematurity.

Your support has helped us to conduct more than 9,300 screenings for babies at risk of retinopathy of prematurity, mostly at the National Center for Maternal and Child Health.

As a result of our ongoing advocacy work, we’ve helped make pediatric eye health a priority for Mongolia’s policymakers and the Ministry of Health.

We are contributing to the national model of diabetes prevention and diabetic retinopathy care to ensure those at risk can access timely interventions. Retinal imaging is being used in five diabetic clinics for DR screening.

We are helping create a network of seven provincial hospitals carrying out manual small-incision cataract surgery, with ongoing awareness activities in local communities to help improve access to and uptake of care.

We also helped create an innovative model of ophthalmic education by establishing a digital training hub and remote surgical mentorship program. This program has helped many of our local partners, such as Dr. Battsetseg, access remote mentorship to deal with complicated cases via our online telemedicine platform, Cybersight.

• Hosted nine Flying Eye Hospital projects and two virtual Flying Eye Hospital projects
• Two neonatal intensive care units and 14 neonatology clinics in the country have been upgraded through provision of equipment and training of physicians
• Supported the establishment or improvement of:
  • 24 secondary hospitals
  • Three tertiary hospitals
  • One wet lab
• Orbis Mongolia supported the Ministry of Health to expand ROP screening, train over 369 health professionals, and integrate newborn vision screening into the national health system—a move that will benefit generations to come.
• Contributed to the increase in the pediatric cataract surgery rate at the National Center for Maternal and Child Health from 20 cases per year to 100 cases per year.
• Orbis supported the first-ever eye clinic in a hospital in an informal housing area (Ger district), bringing accessible services to over 166,000 underserved residents.

Our long-standing efforts have helped make pediatric eye health a priority for Mongolia's policy makers and the Ministry of Health. Building on our past success, we will continue to work with our partners on the following areas:

• Train critically needed eye health professionals
• Provide essential equipment and instruments to partners
• Lead research and advocacy work to raise awareness of eye health
• Work with policymakers to address unmet needs, from access to refraction screening and corrective lenses, to care for complex eye diseases, particularly for children

• National Center for Maternal and Child Health
• Mongolia Ministry of Health
• Mongolian Diabetes Association
• Mongolia First Central Hospital
• Third Central Hospital of Mongolia