AST eye camps treat 665,000 patients; to expand services to Afghanistan, East Africa

RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 15th Apr, 2026) Al-Shifa Trust’s( AST) community outreach programmes treated more than 665,000 patients in the 2024–25 financial year, while a newly launched mobile operation theatre is set to expand free eye surgery services to remote areas lacking fixed facilities.

Briefing the media, President Al-Shifa Trust, Major General (Retired) Rehmat Khan, said the Al-Shifa Centre for Community Ophthalmology (ACCO) organised over 1,400 eye camps during the year, screening more than 420,000 patients and 244,000 schoolchildren for vision defects. A total of 13,777 surgeries,mostly cataract procedures were performed, he added.

He said the programme had also broadened its scope by screening over 38,000 individuals for hypertension and diabetes.

Khan said the newly commissioned mobile theatre, developed in collaboration with Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL), comprised two specialised truck units. One unit houses power generation, sterilisation and pre-operative facilities, while the other converts into a fully equipped operating theatre with two surgical tables, enabling up to 100 surgeries per day.

Managing Director OGDCL, Ahmed Hayat Lak, said the company had sponsored 160 surgical camps since 2017, facilitating around 28,000 surgeries, treating 260,000 patients and screening 75,000 schoolchildren.

General Manager ACCO, Dr Hafiz Muhammad Najam-ul-Hasnat, said the centre had conducted approximately 150,000 surgeries over the past 25 years across all four provinces, as well as Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. He added that the programme expanded internationally in 2024–25, serving 5,632 beneficiaries and performing more than 400 cataract operations in Somalia, with plans to extend services to Afghanistan and East Africa.

Following the 2025 monsoon floods, ACCO teams reached over 32,000 affected people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern and southern Punjab, distributing medicines, spectacles and hygiene kits.

According to Al-Shifa Trust, around 26 million people in Pakistan live with vision impairment, including 1.5 million who are blind and over three million children at risk of preventable sight loss. Nearly 90 per cent reside in low-income areas with limited access to care.

Pakistan has only 15 ophthalmologists, five optometrists and nine allied ophthalmic personnel per million people, underscoring a significant shortfall in eye care services and the need for sustained public health investment beyond charity-led initiatives.