Dr Duke Mataka is the sole ophthalmologist employed in Tonga. Since January 2019, he has been working full-time across the country's 108,000 population, having recently completed his surgical ophthalmic training at the Pacific Eye Institute (PEI) in Fiji.
Dr Duke, as he is known, is an accomplished and skilled surgeon who runs a theatre list most weeks at the Vaiola hospital, dealing mainly with pterygiae and cataracts. Trips from the Surgical Outreach teams from the PEI, and VOSO’s Dr Andrew Riley, have managed to reduce the number of cataract-blind patients over a 10-year period to the stage where Dr Duke is now keeping up with the incidence of cataracts across the entire population.
The vision requirement for surgery in Tonga is now about 6/18, a marked improvement from when VOSO first started running aid trips to the Pacific island 12 years ago.
As a result, when VOSO contacted Dr Duke about this year’s trip, he said the most useful thing we could do this year was to help with surgical supplies and in the clinic with several difficult cases the team have been dealing with.
We took over 60kgs of supplies, including a large number of medications such as topical antibiotics, glaucoma drugs and oral antibiotics. Some Avastin was given to the hospital as well as operating consumables.
