At the University of St. Andrew’s Medical School Dr. Andrew Blaikie provides many opportunities for his students to flourish. One such student is Aadhya Regmi who is currently in her 3rd year of the six year medical school program. Aadhya was born in Nepal, but at the age of nine old her family left Nepal and moved to Aberdeen, Scotland. Her ancestral roots in Nepal were never far from her heart, so when she came to know about the Arclight Project and Dr. Blaikie, she decided that she would focus her 10,000 word dissertation on primary eye health care in Nepal. Aadhya would set her sights on translating the Arclight Primary EyeCare videos into Nepalese and then help to promote its use through YouTube and other campaigns. Aadhya had to work quickly as her dissertation was to be completed within ten weeks which left little time to properly promote and share the videos.
After expressing her concerns, she was relieved to find that Dr. Blaikie agreed with her completely and requested she extend her work and timeline! After six months they hope to re-examine the statistics and see if the campaign has had the desired effect on awareness and protocols. Aadhya explained that Nepalese NGOs like Nepal Netra Jyoti Sangh and the hospitals do collect data regarding incidence of blindness in Nepal. That will be particularly helpful in her analysis regarding where and how best to spread awareness. Aadhya told KTG that it is very difficult to have a public campaign in Nepal because most people have private health care so it is very cost prohibitive for those in rural areas. Additionally, in the rural areas, children are at home and do not have access to eye screening. The good news is that western medicine is ever so slowly becoming more and more welcomed by the Nepal communities. With the aid of the Arclight, eye health care can be provided more affordably and we hope as it proves its efficacy it will be more widely used there! We at KTG will look forward to keeping an eye on Aadhya and her work and hope to share more about her efforts and translations. We will look forward to providing her materials that can help her right away and at KTG we hope to launch an awareness campaign in Nepal in 2024!
(To see Aadhya’s translated Primary Eye Care videos in Nepalese please visit Arclight Project, WHO Primry Eye Care Videos)
