Jeuti Eye Bank, run by NGO ‘Jeuti’, is housed at Chandraprabha Eye Hospital, Jorhat. The Eye Bank has been rendering immense services to the community by procuring cornea from dead persons and arranging transplantation in corneally blind people. All together 86 corneas were collected in 2005. Besides being utilized at CPEH, the corneas were sent to Sri Sankardeva Netharalaya Guwahati, Regional Institute of Ophthalmology, Guwahati and private cornea and anterior segment practitioners. |
Chandraprabha Eye Hospital houses the Jeuti Eye bank which is a private eye bank and run by an NGO named Jeuti. Jeuti Eye Bank was established in 2002. Till then eye donation and corneal transplantation was virtually non existent in Assam and North Eastern India. In its first year, ‘Jeuti concentrated on making people aware of the situation by organizing series of lectures at schools, colleges and organizations and the response of the people was quite impressive. The collection of corneas in the first year was 4 (Sep 2002 to Dec 2002). The response of the people gets better in the next year when corneal tissue harvesting rose to 28. In 2004, another 38 corneas were collected. The Eye Bank has already collected 58 corneas from April 2004 to March 2005. The corneas collected by Jeuti Eye Bank have so far been sent to Cataract & IOL Hospital, Jorhat, Sri Sankardeva Nethralaya, Guwahati, RIO, Guwahati Medical College and private cornea practioners. The eye donations engineered by ‘Jeuti’ ushered a new era in Assam where corneally blind people no longer have to go to outside the state to get the transplantation surgeries done.
The Jeuti Eye Bank is an Institutional member of Eye Bank Association of India (EBAI). It has been sending its quarterly report to EBAI regularly.
In 2004-2005, Jeuti Eye Bank organized 24 awareness lectures at different organizations in Jorhat, Golaghat, Tinsukia, Digboi and Sivasagar. During eye donation fortnight, it organized a procession by school children through the main streets of Jorhat Town. On 5th September 2004, it felicitated twenty donor families at a public meeting held at Jorhat. It also organized a mass postering
throughout the district during the eye donation fortnight. Two large hoardings were put up at two prominent places of the town. The ‘Jeuti Members’ visit the donor families during their period of bereavement and handover the appreciation letter.
The trustees of the Jeuti Eye Bank have handed over the responsibility of managing the JEB to the management of CPEH. The trust has a corpus fund, the interest of which is being utilized to run the day-to-day activities of JEB. |