The challenges of delivering health care in Solomon Islands reflect those across other nations in the Pacific region. With low spending on health, low ratios of doctors and nurses to population, poor health infrastructure, environmental vulnerability, and geography that isolates much of the population from health services it can be extremely difficult to receive essential health care.
Solomon Islands has a local eye care workforce who were trained by us at the Pacific Eye Institute in Fiji and operate from various hospitals and eye clinics across the country.
All Foundation-trained eye doctors and the majority of the Foundation-trained nurses are based at the Regional Eye Centre in Honiara which we built in 2015. With this facility providing increased surgical capacity, the team are working towards eliminating the backlog of cataracts and helping to address other eye conditions. An outreach team from Honiara provides support to the other eye nurses placed throughout the country, helping deliver eye care services to their communities.
The clinic is off-the-grid, producing more energy than it can use through its solar panel system.