________________________ INTERVIEW
Hong Kong 'Lifeline Express' An Interview with:-
Dr Dennis Lam
Chairman
Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Prince of Wales Hospital
Shatin, NT
Hong Kong
Millions of people in China suffer from reversible blindness, including more than 4 million people with cataracts. It was for this reason that the Better Hong Kong Foundation established a mobile hospital train to travel throughout China to perform eye surgery for the needy.
The Hong Kong 'Lifeline Express' is a 3-carriage hospital train donated by the Hong Kong people to the people of mainland China to commemorate the reunification of Hong Kong with China on 1 July 1997. Since then, the hospital train has been shuttling amongst remote areas of the mainland, providing free medical treatment to patients blinded by cataracts.
By the end of July this year, the Hong Kong Lifeline Express had provided its services at Fuyang City in Anhui Province, the Yi Minority Autonomous Region at Liangshan in Sichuan Province, Huangpi County at Wuhan City in Hubei Province, and Longyan City and Sanming City in Fujian Province, restoring the eyesight of more than 2,200 patients with cataracts. The hospital train is currently providing free medical service at Jinhua City in Zhejiang Province. Without the arrival of Hong Kong Lifeline Express, these blind people were likely to have lived in darkness for the rest of their lives.
Hong Kong Lifeline Express not only provides free operations for poverty-stricken cataract patients, but also enables medical practitioners in Hong Kong and China to work together and benefit from an exchange of expertise. This helps to foster close ties between the ordinary people of Hong Kong and China.In the past year, more than 10 Hong Kong medical practitioners volunteered to work on the hospital train and 2 ophthalmologists from the mainland were invited to take a training course in Hong Kong to enhance their micro-surgical techniques. After completing the training course, they will work for the Hong Kong Lifeline Express to help cataract patients on the mainland.
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