The Australian always, quietly, making a big difference |
Thirty-four years ago, celebrated eye doctor Fred Hollows established a partnership with millions of Australians to set in place an international development plan to attack the blindness which unnecessarily afflicts about 30 million people around the world.
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Experts, local and international, told him his plan was foolish and impractical, running the risk of becoming a cruel hoax, of demolishing his reputation and a massive waste of money. Fred's plan was for some of the poorest countries in the world. It was not to be a system of handouts, or of making the recipients conform to Australian precepts. It was not established to glorify Australia, or to make heroes of the doctors and other healthcare professionals who became involved. The plan was to make self-supporting partnerships with the recipient nations, seeding them to run and control programs themselves. Around the world, tens of millions were blind from conditions, such as cataracts, which were easily treatable, in the developed world at least, with surgery and intraocular lenses costing hundreds of dollars.
The argument against Fred's idea was that no one in the poorest countries could afford a fraction of that current cost. If such sums of money were to become available for third world healthcare, there would, in any event, be higher priorities than providing surgery for blindness. In some of these nations, the total public health budget was well under $50 per head a year. Nice as it might be to do something for these sufferers, it could not command the priority and ran the risk of providing second rate eye care for the very few.
Hollows had run a successful program attacking trachoma and other eye health conditions in rural Australia, particularly among Indigenous Australians. He had helped establish Aboriginal-run medical services around Australia, including the first at Redfern. He was not interested in second-rate services.
His aspiration was for services in Africa and Asia, and other countries, of the same quality as could be obtained in an expensive clinic in Switzerland or Randwick, NSW. The secret, he thought, would be in building high-quality intraocular lens factories in some of these nations. The factories would be set to produce a surplus beyond local needs, able to be exported to the industrialised world and thus used to help make programs self-sustaining. The surgical model did not involve eye doctors coming from Australia to perform cataract operations but visiting to help train locals to do the work. (In many countries, Australian doctors have now moved to training the trainers of the trainers. And the actual cost of an intraocular lens kit with sterile surgical pack is now less than $10 at source - an astonishing achievement.)
Training the trainers of the trainers
On Thursday, one of those who, along with Fred's wife Gabi, was there at the beginning, Michael Johnson died of a blood cancer. He would have turned 80 this July. He was a running and cycling mate of Fred who had moved into Fred's house in Randwick, and who, in the three years Hollows and his teams travelled to more than 500 communities, seeing 110,000 people all around Australia, managed a group of householders constantly supplemented by visitors, informal seminars, Scottish dancing and suicidal bike rides around the South Head roads. Michael Johnson was very popular among those who knew him, and very respected among those who had dealings with him. But he was not a big noter and, if a recipient of a medal of the Order of Australia, not loudly celebrated in the media or in the social columns. A good man, a decent man. A lover of life who had an amazing giggle, and sometimes a habit of saying "gosh" and "golly".
I have spent much of recent months despairing of the calibre and directions of Australian leadership, the hopelessness and lack of ambition of Australian and world politicians, and the way in which, in so many areas, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. By no means all of it is due to the attitude of mind brought to issues of helping others by Donald Trump. Some of it comes from the essential meanness of spirit exhibited by our prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made manifest this week again with the decision that Australia will do all in its power to prevent........