Volunteers Measure Results

Unite For Sight sponsors the eye care provided for patients who are seen through the Unite For Sight outreach programs. Rather than billing each patient for the eye care that they receive, the eye clinic bills Unite For Sight. Eye clinics generally invoice Unite For Sight for the eye care provided on a monthly basis. Unite For Sight sponsors the eye care programs well in excess of the funds raised by the volunteers. By raising funds, volunteers enable Unite For Sight to sponsor an even greater number of surgeries and eye care and therefore provide surgery to many more patients who are in dire need. 100% of all donations to Unite For Sight provide eye care for patients living in extreme poverty who are receiving eye care from the Unite For Sight partner clinics.

Unite For Sight requires that each of its partner eye clinics follow a strict and transparent accounting system, which includes several forms of documentation that you as a volunteer may be involved with while abroad. Global Impact Fellows are not involved with any accounting or financial matters, but they do assist the clinic with compiling the data and information that Unite For Sight requires the clinics to submit.

  • Surgery Table: When each patient receives surgery, the operating surgeon and observing Unite For Sight volunteer are both required to sign their name confirming each surgery that is completed. The volunteer must take special care to sign for only one surgery at a time, and only at the time that a surgery is completed.

  • Patient Excel Database: Every patient receiving surgery is entered into an Excel database that includes their background information, preoperative visual acuity, outcome in the form of postoperative visual acuity, dates of their postoperative follow-ups, complications (if any), along with other relevant data.

Unite For Sight's volunteers assist the local eye clinics with recording, compiling, and submitting the patient outcome data to Unite For Sight. When the eye clinic assigns data collection to a volunteer, the volunteer is required to be committed to ensuring that their data input is 100% accurate. When received by Unite For Sight's office in the U.S., the data is analyzed to assess impact and to monitor quality.

Important Instructions: Your Signature For Surgeries Sponsored By Unite For Sight

Unite For Sight's accounting policy requires comprehensive data from each eye clinic for surgeries sponsored by the organization. A Global Impact Fellow must observe every surgery sponsored by Unite For Sight, and that volunteer as well as the operating surgeon must sign for each surgery as it is completed. This process ensures comprehensive documentation for all of the surgeries that Unite For Sight sponsors worldwide each year.

As a Global Impact Fellow, you will be asked by the eye clinic to sign a surgery signature form. Please familiarize yourself with the surgery form by clicking here: Surgery Signature Form As a volunteer, it is important that you:

  • Only sign for each Unite For Sight-sponsored surgery at the immediate time when you observe it. This ensures that the eye clinic keeps a careful accounting record of surgeries to be sponsored by Unite For Sight.

  • If an eye clinic staff member accidentally asks you to sign for any surgery that you did not observe immediately prior to signing, you should politely state that you did not just observe that surgery. It is the eye clinic's responsibility to ensure that they adhere to the proper accounting protocol, and you should simply sign for surgeries immediately after observing the surgeries.

  • If a surgery occurs from 8-8:10am, for instance, you must sign for the surgery at 8:10am. If another surgery occurs from 8:10-8:20am, you must sign for the next surgery at 8:20am.

  • Unite For Sight sponsors surgeries only for patients living in poverty. Paying patients cannot be included as a Unite For Sight-sponsored surgery and must not be signed for or included on the surgery signature page. The clinic staff will explain to volunteers which patients are being sponsored by Unite For Sight.

  • When you return home, you will be asked to submit a form through your volunteer login page in which you will be asked to:

  • Confirm that you signed the surgery form immediately after observing the surgery on a Unite For Sight-sponsored patient. Or, to inform us if there were times when you signed for surgeries that did not follow this protocol.

  • Indicate how many surgeries you observed and signed for.