Flights for vision

When earlier this year I read about a documentary called Hospital in the Sky, my curiosity was piqued. Was this a metaphor for something? I soon found out that it was quite literally an eye hospital aboard a plane, which travels the world to treat patients. This specially-converted jumbo jet is called Orbis’ Flying Eye Hospital. It is a fully-equipped mobile ophthalmic hospital as well as a teaching facility. The documentary is an eye-opener and the narrator is the Swiss watch brand OMEGA’s ambassador Cindy Crawford, who talks about how Orbis’ flying hospital was set up in 1982 and has travelled to 92 countries helping over 23 million lives. This film is a 48-minute joint production between OMEGA and Orbis and it chronicles model Crawford and her daughter Kaia’s day aboard the Flying Eye Hospital in Trujillo, Peru. 

Orbis is a large international charity dedicated to saving eyesight and has been teaching and training doctors, nurses and bio-medical engineers in the skills needed to save sight. The Orbis Flying Eye Hospital is the result of a unique convergence of medical and aviation industries. Once the people at Orbis realised that the high costs of tuition, international travel and accommodations prevented most doctors and nurses in developing countries from participating in overseas training programmes, they built a system where the treatment and the knowledge went to the patients and doctors, alike. So what made a luxury watch brand like OMEGA get involved in a project like this? “The nature of our support is twofold: we make a financial contribution that is linked to the sales of certain watches while we use our international reputation to raise awareness about what Orbis is doing to change lives around the world. We have learned from our friends at Orbis that the vast majority of blindness on Earth is preventable or treatable. Knowing that motivates us to do all we can to help the organisation and to raise its profile,” says Stephen Urquhart, President of OMEGA.
Read news in full 15/08/15 Rini Mukkath/The Hindu