Fundación Visión

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), there are approximately 180 million people in the world with some type of visual impairment and, of all of them, between 40 and 45 million are totally blind. In addition, approximately 1.2 billion people in the world need optical correction with glasses.
Paraguay is no stranger to this problem, there are a total of 1,200,000 people over 50 years of age in the country; according to the projections, of this group, 32,000 have problems of blindness and of these, 70% of these have cataracts.
According to the RAP carried out during 2011, these are the factors that cause a high number of ophthalmological problems in Paraguay:

-The lack of information about the problem, other factors are broken down in this category. For example: fear. Through travel within the country and conversations with patients, we learned that fear of procedures is a major factor preventing access to eye care. Another consequence of the lack of information is not knowing that the problem has a solution. 5% of people answered that they did not know that they could restore their sight with a simple operation.

-The difficulty in accessing the service is another important point. In this category we find two secondary reasons: remoteness and cost. Many people, at least 2.6 million, live in rural areas with limited access to health information and services. These people must travel long distances and invest a lot of money to access quality health services, therefore, we often hear stories of people who preferred to lose their sight so as not to spend money on it and financially harm their loved ones.

-The difficulty to follow the treatment is a third important factor. If they agree to the first consultation and corrective surgery, they cannot do medical follow-up due to cost or distance, therefore, full vision recovery is difficult.
All these factors have an even greater impact when there are several people in the household who have ophthalmological problems.

Our solution consists of acquiring another mobile equipped with essential instruments to diagnose eye pathologies in people.
The Foundation already has a mobile clinic that makes an average of 20 trips a year and travels 80,000km a year, but it is not enough to cover the entire country since it mainly goes north. With the acquisition of another car with superior technology, we will also be able to cover the southeast of the country, which has great needs in terms of eye health.
The mobile clinic will be run by doctors, who will go to the most impoverished areas of the country to treat people. It will offer the same quality services that are available in the 5 clinics installed in different areas of the country. With this working model, it is the foundation that adapts to patients, thus closing the distance gap and offering services with social prices. In this way, distance and lack of resources will not be a barrier to access to health.
In addition, during these trips, training on eye care will be carried out to prevent the lack of information from being an impediment for future consultations. With these trainings, people will be able to detect any visual disability in its early stages and seek the corresponding help, either with the foundation or in the private/state service that most convinces them.

Farmers, the indigenous population and people living in poverty in the interior of the country are the main beneficiaries of this service. The most visited area will be the southeast of the country, specifically in the departments of Caazapá, Misiones or Ñeembucú.
In these regions live people who never received ophthalmological care, since the times that doctors visited that area they found stories like this. There are always families with very limited resources that have both older adults with advanced cataracts or children who need glasses.
An especially vulnerable population is the indigenous population, there are more than 100,000 indigenous people in Paraguay, it is a community in constant danger and whose population is gradually losing ground in society. Cultural differences, language differences and scarce economic resources are barriers that must be overcome in the areas of health, education or work.

The team of doctors that will lead this service has years of experience working in the field with people living in poverty. It is a team of doctors and assistants who currently manage the mobile clinic that goes to the north of the country. This team will be redeployed to manage the new clinic that will go to the southeast of the country.

Community health is the area that will execute the solution and will take the service to the most remote areas of the country. The doctors selected for this work must not only be of high level, but must also have ethics and empathy towards the most vulnerable people. The team constantly receives feedback from the communities visited to improve the service.

A very important barrier to execute our solution is the economic one. The foundation is able to pay salaries and running costs for new projects, but has difficulty acquiring high-cost new technology. The very large expenses that are necessary to make to expand the building or acquire new machinery are those that impede the growth of the organization. Therefore, seeing that MIT Solve is interested in improving primary health care, we decided to apply.
Another important point is prestige. Winning a challenge like this will give prestige to the institution, allowing access to more opportunities in the future to continue growing. We also take into account that by winning we will have contact with people from MIT who have the same dream as us and who will be able to provide us with quality technical advice that will improve our service. MIT is an institution that is constantly among the top positions in the QS ranking, this guarantees the quality of the advice and fairness in the final decision.

It will innovate the services provided by the Foundation since not only will it be possible to purchase a new mobile clinic that will cover areas of the country never visited before, but it will also improve the technology of said clinics, thus achieving better quality care.

With this model of community care, the idea of the patient going to the doctor is inverted, it is the doctor who goes to the patient, thus closing the gap faced by people who live in remote areas and have no resources.
Ophthalmological care is of the same quality that is provided in traditional offices, the innovative touch is the mobility of the service and the purchase of the appropriate technology adapted to mobility. Until now, machinery designed for fixed offices was used during trips and these are heavier and larger than portable ones.

e want to reach more than 5,000 people per year for the next few years. We will arrive at these figures thanks to the dozens of annual trips that will be made to the interior of the country and through networking with state services. State services have data on communities that the Foundation has not yet reached. To simplify efforts, networking will take place and the resources of each institution will be used to reach more people.

In 5 years we plan to reach 25,000 people thanks to two equipped mobile clinics. With 25,000 people with excellent eye health, it will be easier to improve living standards, access better jobs and improve academic results.

By registering patients in a digital database.

The indicators to be used will be:
- Number of trips made
- Number of people who made the first ophthalmological consultation
- Number of people correctly diagnosed
- Number of people who underwent corrective medical procedures
- Perception of the service by the communities visited

These indicators aim to meet objective 3 of the Sustainable Development Goals. To a lesser extent, we aim to reduce inequalities by fulfilling objective 10.

During interviews with patients who received eye care, we heard so many stories about lives changed after sight was restored.

Losing your vision has a ripple effect on a person's life and their community. Loss of sight, as we saw through the story of Librado Martínez in our inspiring video, triggers difficulties in the family, at work, in social life, in mental health and in school.
The loss of sight becomes a disability, which leads the person into a situation of social exclusion with severe consequences in life. If several people in the same community lose their sight, there is a risk of increasing the rate of unemployment, poverty and mental health problems. We were able to talk with people who even suffered from depression after becoming visually impaired. This generates a breakdown in family ties, which is a risk factor for poor school performance and therefore future low-paid jobs.
Having a good diagnosis, with the correction of ocular pathologies and with the promotion of good health habits will have a positive effect as a shock wave in the community. This will increase community resilience, employment and academic opportunities, and improve people's self-esteem.

Cataract surgery is one of the most cost-effective in the world. Not only is it easy to perform, with almost zero recovery time and cost, but it is also done in 10 minutes. Cataract is an important cause of blindness in the country and thanks to a small surgery like this, the quality of life of thousands of people will improve in an integral way. In addition, the positive effects are seen immediately and the benefits last a lifetime.

We will use new portable slit lamps in the mobile clinics. These lamps take up less space than non-portable slit lamps, so vehicles can house other medical supplies and improve service.

The risk of damage, the assembly time, the physical space occupied and the difficulty of moving large slit lamps are great disadvantages when using them in community visits.
We want to acquire two portable slit lamps, the newest on the market, to optimize time and space during trips to the interior of the country.

In addition, we would like to purchase another vehicle to serve as a mobile clinic to increase the number of trips.

The doctors who are in Community Health are the ones who register the patients in a digital database. This data is used by the directors of the Foundation to measure the growth of the organization and detect vulnerabilities in coverage.

Having up-to-date and accurate data helps plan activities, trips and the hiring of specialized personnel if necessary. The Foundation also conducts research to find out which eye pathologies are most common in Paraguay, what their causes are, and what measures are most efficient to solve the problem. This was of vital importance after the Covid 19 pandemic since we detected an increase in eye pathologies in people who were infected during quarantine.

The Community Health service is in charge of detecting the most remote and vulnerable communities in the country and then bringing them medical services. Communities far from urban areas, families in poverty, single mothers, indigenous people, farmers and people with disabilities are the priority for this service.

The foundation has a Disability and Inclusion Department, this department is responsible for ensuring that all our activities are inclusive and leave no one behind.

Fundación Vision Paraguay is an organization that was born in 1991 with the aim of ensuring that no person in Paraguay goes blind due to preventable and avoidable causes. To achieve this goal, it develops high-quality free cataract surgery projects. Currently Fundación Visión has enabled more than 30,000 people in Paraguay to recover their visual capacity through cataract surgery and more than 1,000,000 people have access to ophthalmological consultations. In 2019 Fundación Visión has carried out 5,000 cataract surgeries and benefited more than 100,000 people, considerably reducing the prevalence of avoidable blindness in Paraguay. Three years ago, the Disability and Inclusive Development program was born, which allows us to take care not only of eye patients, but also of people with disabilities, who, with some tools and adjustments in society, can lead a much fuller life. Knowledge about the challenges of young people with visual impairments would not only allow us to improve our services in order to provide greater accessibility, but also outside our institution to advocate for better public policies.

The Foundation offers dental, ophthalmological and hearing medical services at social prices, thus covering the basic expenses of maintenance and salaries. In addition, it offers postgraduate specialization in ophthalmology and supervised internships thanks to its Phaco Training Center, which generate constant income.

Another method of financing is with the presentation of social projects to international organizations. Thanks to the projects won, it was possible to expand the capacity of the clinics and with this the flow of patients.
Finally, the Foundation has contacts with companies and thanks to Corporate Social Responsibility, solid financial stability is achieved.

During 2021 the Foundation obtained funds from the Australian Embassy. He won these funds by presenting a project that offered audiological and ophthalmological medical care to indigenous communities in the interior of the country. The project was a success and the funders were happy with the results.

Another example is the project won with the Pan American Health Organization. This project seeks to facilitate access to information about Covid 19 for people with visual disabilities.

Finally, in recent years, thanks to funding from USAID or embassies in Paraguay, we were able to set up clinics in cities far from the capital, benefiting thousands of people.