Eye Corps president discusses her path to improve cataract surgery in Tanzania
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
MONTEREY, Calif. — When you need to find your path or make an important choice in your life, be quiet, be kind to yourself and listen to the spirit inside you.
This is what Susan MacDonald, MD, did when she made the life-changing decision to leave her private practice and devote herself to mission work in Africa, helping to found and then lead Eye Corps, a nonprofit in Tanzania.
“We are a female organization, and our mission is to help cataract surgeons in low-resource areas by providing training, mentorship and access to equipment. We are certainly making an impact on the quality of cataract surgery in Tanzania and are looking forward to expanding to other sub-Saharan countries in the future,” she said at the Women in Ophthalmology Summer Symposium.
Since her experience as an exchange student in Africa at the age of 17, MacDonald has always been interested in global outreach and has regularly participated in surgical outreach trips in various parts of the world. There, she realized that there were two major areas of unmet need and critical intervention. One was the lack of even the most basic equipment.
“There were ophthalmologists being trained that did not have access to microscopes, surgical trays, slit lamps, funduscopes,” she said.
The second was the scarcity of mentorship and surgical training.
To help remove these barriers to expanding eye care, MacDonald had something to contribute: her experience as a surgeon in both the public and private sector and as a teacher at Tufts University School of Medicine, with a strong interest and involvement in training residents in cataract surgery.
“I am happy and proud I had the courage to make the pivot. I have, for the last 4.5 years, been leading an NGO, and everything I did prior to this has made me uniquely qualified to be able to do this successfully. There is still a lot I have to learn, but a part of me being a woman and being curious and a part of me being a surgeon has allowed me to make an impact in the quality of cataract surgery in Tanzania,” she said.
She encouraged anyone interested in working with Eye Corps to contact her at susan@eyecorps.org.
“Listen to the spirit inside you, and if there is an opportunity and you are 70% qualified, go for it. You will get that extra 30% when you have started,” MacDonald said.
Collapse
MacDonald S. Where do I go now? Elite status mentality. Presented at: Women in Ophthalmology Summer Symposium; Aug. 25-28, 2022; Monterey, California (hybrid meeting).
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts