Medical team returns after helping Caribbean patients

A 10-member volunteer medical team dispatched by Beijing government returned on Sunday after providing surgeries that benefited more than 300 cataract patients in two Caribbean countries.

The team, comprising of experienced doctors and nurses from Beijing Tongren Hospital, a top hospital in China specializing in treating eye diseases, left Beijing for Antigua and Barbuda, and Jamaica on May 6. They provided free surgeries to 347 cataract patients in the two countries over the past three weeks, which restored or improved eyesight for more than 330 of them, according to Beijing Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning.

The medical team has provided free surgeries to more than 20,000 impoverished cataracts in countries including Mongolia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Zambia since it first started to go overseas to provide voluntary treatment in 2008, the commission said.