Founder - Dr. Lucy Mathen

Lucy Mathen retrained as a doctor after 16 years as a journalist. This life-changing decision was taken whilst interviewing a medic in Afghanistan in 1988. She became an eye specialist.

In 2000 she took time off from her National Health Service job in the UK to follow a hunch. She believed that the core reason for the huge numbers of cataract- blind patients in rural north India was down to the lack of doctors. So she travelled the breadth of north India to discover if this was true.

“I visited eye hospital after eye hospital, fully equipped but unable to provide much in the way of eye surgery because of no, or too few eye surgeons. When I told this to the UK’s biggest sight charity (who had supplied the equipment) the attitude was ‘well, that’s not our problem.’
Meanwhile the staff at these hospitals begged me to send eye surgeons. So we did, about 50 regulars, providing round the year cover for 10 years. I hoped that this leading by example would encourage a reverse brain drain of local ophthalmologists, particularly in Bihar, the place that needed them most. That dream is now very much a reality.’

Dr Lucy Mathen