The Nanna Kannu group volunteering efforts are one of our biggest success stories.
During our early collaboration with Sankara Eye Hospital we learnt that one of the most significant challenges to reaching eye-care to children in remote areas is to get the teachers in the rural schools to co-operate and perform a simple screening test.
Screening thousands of children scattered across village schools to narrow down those who needed medical attention (around 5-10% of the population) is a humongous task for any hospital. Hence this narrowing down was crucial to optimize the time of medical professionals.
As a solution to the above challenge we designed a volunteering program to channel volunteers from multiple companies to dedicate a day of their weekend to screening the children.The hospitals and volunteers enthusiastically agreed to pilot this exercise and after ironing out some initial glitches the volunteering exercise was launched.
The effort involved close co-ordination with the government education department to map out schools, routes, transport logistics and volunteer deployment. The volunteers were trained by Sankara Hospital on performing the screening. Working in pairs, the trained volunteers did a phenomenal job of thorough evaluation.
This has since resulted in 54000+ children being screened in 6 districts solely through the support of volunteers, thereby identifying children who actually needed eye-care.
Every child who needed treatment or surgery to prevent vision loss is a success story of this effort!