Has a nurse at Sydney Hospital and Sydney Eye Hospital made a difference to your care?

22 May 2022

Dr Tanya Trinh, staff specialist, during the recent surgery in December. Patient is doing well and we look forward to bringing you her story in 2022.

We have achieved something special in 2021, and its thanks entirely to our donor community and the life changing expertise provided by the Sydney Eye Hospital team.

We’ve continued to fund the brightest ophthalmology specialists through our fellowship program placing specialists in our clinics and operating theatres, and in purchasing the latest 3D equipment to enhance capabilities and improve patient experience.

We are also, literally, changing lives.

On Friday 17 December a sight-saving four hour surgical procedure was performed by three surgeons – led by Dr Tanya Trinh and Dr Peter Martin on site with Dr Greg Moloney live-streaming in from Vancouver, Canada – proudly backed by a multi-disciplinary team. This patient was an original recipient of a very rare corneal prosthetic device – an osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis placed by Dr Greg Moloney a few years ago through the support of the Foundation – and they now required salvage treatment to prevent loss of the device and their vision.

Hospital staff were desperate to save her only eye and performed a complex salvage operation using a new microscope adjunct camera system to allow expertise to be drawn from local and international sources.

Our surgical team are the only specialists capable of performing this in Australia. The surgery first took place at Sydney Eye in 2017 when Dr Greg Moloney, captured by 60 Minutes, carefully placed a tooth into the eye of patient John Ings to restore the 72-year-old’s sight after years of blindness.

In this procedure, the patient’s canine tooth is extracted to house the artificial cornea and the tooth is shaped to allow implantation of the device. Once settled, it is then implanted into the patient’s eye.

The Foundation, thanks to you, is extremely proud to fund the research to enable innovative clinical procedures like this. We all need some good news right now and this week’s case is worth celebrating!

From our family here at the Foundation to yours, we wish you a bright and joyful Christmas filled with love, laughter and all those priceless moments that make life wonderful. The Foundation will be closed 24 December 2021- 3 January 2022.

Thanks to Sydney artist Simon Fieldhouse for creating our fun Christmas card (illustration above) for our Foundation.