Ryan Pyle Blog: Aravind Hospitals in India

Hello,

In January 2008 I made contact, through a close friend, at the Aravind Hospital in Maduri, Tamil Nadu in southern India. I think it important to stop here and say that I had never been interested in working in India until this point, because I felt like it was so well covered and so well traveled that I might not have much more to offer on the subject. But I was wrong, and it took the Aravind hospitals to inspire me to think differently.

Aravind hospitals originated in 1976 with the mission of "eliminating needless blindness", what a mission statement!

The Aravind hospital in Maduri is the largest eye care center in the world. Located amongst the rural Indians who need eye care services most, Aravind is committed to fighting the barriers of distance, poverty and ignorance to provide compassionate eye care to some of the world's poorest people. In a banner 12 month people over 2.3 million out patients were treated and some 270,444 surgeries were performed.

The hospital itself is a massive operation of eye care, in the few days I spent there the hospitals were teaming, the crowds were well managed and the care people recieved was incredible. Perhaps even more incredible is the fact that Aravind runs two hospitals in Madui, one pay hospital and one free hospital; and they are side by side. Patients can essentially choose which hospital they would like to visit and pay accordingly, the care received is exactly the same. It's a far cry from the Chinese health care system where the moment you enter the hospital a nurse asks you if you would like to the "expensive" doctor or the "cheap" doctor.

So Aravind does about two thirds of its surgeries for free and one third for a fee, and on this business model they are profitable as well as serving the public, and creating one of the most efficient eye surgeon training programs which has a waiting list from doctors around the world.

Case studies by Havard Business school have made Aravind a low cost, high volume, high quality model for health care around the world. Above is a slide show of my work from my few days in wonderful Maduri. I'm planning on returning to India often in the coming years as I am fascinated by the differences in growth, development and religion between India and China.

LINKS:
Aravind Hospital

If you google Aravind Hospital you'll get a bunch of hits you can search through.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Caring for your Image Collection

Hello,

I'm not ashamed to say it, I'm a film man. Now as a film man one has certain problems, like how to shoot film and turn it around fast enough to satisfy editors used to working with digital photographers; and I can manage that. My newest problem these days, as my career lengthens, is film storage.

I shoot about 10-15 rolls of 35mm each day I work. So on a 5 days assignment I could end up with 75 rolls of film on my hands. Processing, making an edit and having them scanned are crucial to the process, but bagging them and tagging them afterwards is equally important. Why?

I take great comfort in knowing that my photographic archive is physically sitting in my spare bedroom, which I've turned in to a dark room, and not on some fidgity hard drive that may or may not fail some day. Often enough I need to track down a negative and rescan it or bring a series of images to my printer. In other words I am constantly going back to the negative, so keeping them safe and well organized is in my best interest. But how is this done?

There are lots of rumors and misinformation out there. I've found that humidity and direct light are two of the main threats that need to be removed, a difficult task for anyone living in sweaty/sticky Asia. Low temperature storage is best, removal of all potential sunlight is important to achieve that. I could go on and on but instead I'll just pass along the link with all details, which can be found on this site: "Caring For Your Collection", which is published by the National Library of Congress.

Best of luck to everyone in keeping their collections dry, cold and safe for decades to come.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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