U of U eye doctor travels on ‘Flying Eye Hospital’ to perform surgeries in Mongolia

SALT LAKE CITY ( ABC4 ) — A University of Utah doctor recently returned from a three-week trip to Mongolia where she performed eye surgeries and helped train medical professionals — aboard a plane.

Dr. H. Joon Kim is an ophthalmologist who moved from Atlanta to Utah earlier this year to work as an oculoplastic surgeon at the U of U’s John A. Moran Eye Center . While she recently moved states, one thing has remained consistent: her work on the Flying Eye Hospital.

The Flying Eye Hospital is part of a nonprofit named Orbis, and is referred to by its organization’s website as “the marriage between medicine and aviation.”

The nonprofit orchestrates medical trips on an MD-10 aircraft — formerly used for cargo — to transport a functional hospital setting to areas in the world that need eye care training and services.

Kim has traveled with the Orbis aircraft since 2017, with the most recent trip being to Mongolia.

“In Mongolia, one in six school children is visually impaired. So while performing sight-saving surgery is greatly beneficial, even more important is that by training local medical professionals to do more sophisticated procedures the work we did will continue after we fly home,” she said.

According to Orbis’ website , the Flying Eye Hospital landed in Ulaanbaatar where doctors spent three weeks training 250 eye care professionals and performing surgery on 50 people. This is the ninth time the Flying Eye Hospital has visited Mongolia since its first trip in the late 1980s.

The Flying Eye Hospital will next take off in November to help train local professionals and perform eye surgeries in Bangladesh.

There are more than 1 billion people globally who have vision loss, 90% of which is either treatable or preventable, according to the news release.

Treating and preventing vision loss not only impacts the person, but elevates the entire society as “more children will receive an education, have lower mortality rates, and have better earning potential,” the release read.

“We’re trying to create a difference,” Kim told ABC4. “We have the skill set and we have lots of patients around the world, it’s just a matter of improving access to it.”

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