GIFF JOHNSON
Canvasback Missions combined eye and dental team provided services to several hundred Ebeye residents during a six-day visit last month.
Canvasback’s visit was the first it has made to Ebeye since 2019, prior to Covid and border closures preventing their teams from entering for about three years.
Demonstrating high demand and need for both eye and dental services, 389 people were seen by Canvasback doctors: 262 ophthalmology consultations and 127 dental examinations.
The team included 21 health people, including doctors, nurses, technicians and support staff.
Several Ebeye residents and Kate Cannon, the wife of US Army Garrison-Kwajalein Atoll commander Col. Matthew Cannon, volunteered, providing essential support to the team, according to Sterling Spence, one of the organizers of the team.
The 262 eye exams led to 105 eye surgeries, mostly for cataracts.
Canvasback also did something for Ebeye residents that it hasn’t done before in nearly 40 years of service to the Marshall Islands. It located a non-profit group in Texas that makes prescription glasses. The team, at its own expense, brought a range of glasses frames for patients to choose from, and those frames along with the new prescriptions from individual examinations are being sent to the company to make new glasses for 82 Ebeye residents.
“We are providing 82 prescription custom glasses to patients (as a result of the visit),” said Canvasback Vice President and mission coordinator Jacque Spence. She added that it was the first time a Canvasback eye team was able to do this.
In the past, Canvasback teams were limited to bringing a range of reading glasses that patients tried out to find one that helped. By locating the non-profit organization in Texas that makes prescription glasses, they were able to offer a service that will, once they are delivered back to Ebeye, provide patients with glasses custom made for their vision needs.
The team also provided reading glasses to 75 patients and dispensed 212 sunglasses that help with protection against eye damage from ultra violet radiation from the sun.
On the dental side, the 127 patients who were examined by the dentist received various services ranging from sealants, silver diamine fluoride, and varnish to extractions and fillings.
Canvasback Missions is considering four possible medical missions to RMI in 2026.
Spence said the US-based organization is looking at ophthalmology (eye) and OBGYN (women’s health) teams to visit Majuro, a dental team for Ebeye with an ear-nose-throat specialist team probable for Ebeye, based on a request from health authorities.
These are in the planning stage but have yet to be confirmed.
Spence pointed out that Covid has had a dramatic and negative impact on Canvasback’s fundraising capability. Prior to Covid, hospitals donated a large volume of the supplies and equipment that Canvasback brought to the islands to support each medical team visit, she said.
Now, however, with escalating prices and changing dynamics in the healthcare industry in the US, hospitals are unable to contribute in the way they did pre-Covid, Spence said. This has increased the burden on Canvasback as an organization as well as individual doctors who volunteer their services to fundraise to purchase needed supplies.
The Ministry of Health and Human Services provides funding to pay for airfares and per diem for team members. When the value of the services provided — specialist doctors, nurses and technicians’ time, and the cost of supplies and equipment used and provided — is totaled, the ministry’s contribution is a small percentage of the total, showing the extraordinary value of these medical visits to RMI.