Andean Medical Mission
Setting up a suitable operating space.
There usually are some DIY repairs/modifications to adjust to conditions!
Screening patients to find treatable disease.
Me performing a cataract extraction. The dense black lens extracted shown below.
The whole village coming to say thank you and farewell!
In 2011 a group of medical professionals came together to form The Andean Medical Mission, a charity aimed at treating blindness and blinding eye disease in the remote regions of the Bolivian Amazon. Mr Gouws is a founding member and a director in the charity and undertakes yearly trips to this remote region.
According to the World Health Organization, Bolivia is the poorest nation in South America and citizens who live in rural areas are disproportionately affected by poverty. 43% of the population lives below the international poverty line and 23% live below the international extreme poverty line.
In the rural Amazon basin, living conditions are challenging and blindness is dangerous and severely limiting as there are no support services. We now have a manager, David Goldsmith, living in Bolivia to co-ordinate trips on the ground and act as liaison with government organisations.
This June 2019, Mr Gouws led a team of 4 people on a 2-week camp to Reyes, a small town in the North of Bolivia on the Beni River as well San Lorenzo, a very remote village in the Moxos area. We passes the milestone of 1000 blind people operated on! All members are volunteers and self-fund their journey. Travel is very arduous and then the hard work begins….
We typically spend a half day setting up a suitable theatre space, clinic area and some basic accommodation before starting to see patients. The aim is to maximise surgeries performed during the mission and therefore tend to work very long hours.
Due to COVID we have not been able to do any trips in 2020 but in 2021 we are collaborating with the Bolivian ministery for health to provide COVID vaccinations to the remote areas we have worked in before.
We resumed full normal operations in 2024 with 2 surgical trips treating 220 patients in total.
The first Trip (Magdalena and Santa Ana) was a great success and as we had the help of an aneasthetist, we were able to operate on young blind children with very successful outcomes making significant improvements in their quality of life.
The second trip (San Ignacio and San Borja) was focussed more on training local ophthalmologists and introducing advanced surgical techniques like phacoemulsification. Collaboration with local doctors, enhancing their skills and providing ongoing support is one of the ways we leave a legacy of improved eye care in all the areas we treat.
Congratulations to the whole team at AMM and all the volunteers who make this work possible. We achieved significant surgical volume increases and made meaningful strides in training local medical staff, reinforcing their commitment to addressing avoidable blindness in the region.
Special thanks to Jeremy Joseph, Pav Singh, Mital Shah, Emma Dixon and Simon Howling in the 1st team. Marta Latasiewicz, Seyed Ghazi-Nouri, Agnieszka Dyrda, Marko Sulak and Luciana Gutierrez Arze who made up the 2nd team.
Thank you to Surgitrac and BVI for donating supplies for these trips!
Please support our mission at https://www.justgiving.com/andeanmedicalmission
To learn more about us, please visit https://andeanmedicalmission.co.uk/
Little Lexxi, a 2-year-old was operated on for bilateral congenital cataract in 2024. Lexxi was born blind and is otherwise a very strong and determined young lady!
Lexxi is pictured here one week after her surgeries, happy and playing in the hospital waiting area!
