Seeing Hope in Asuoso: WVU Eye Institute carries on decade-long tradition of providing vision care for Ghanian patients

For more than a decade, a team from the West Virginia University Eye Institute, led by Professor and Executive Chair Thomas Mauger, M.D., has been traveling to one of the most remote regions of Ghana to deliver critical vision-saving eye care services to local patients.

The mission of these trips is two-fold. They provide an avenue for Ghanian patients to receive highly specialized ocular care, while also serving as an ideal training opportunity that helps the next generation of ophthalmologists discover a true passion for service through medicine.

The initiative originally began through a partnership with Marion Remmerswaal, a nurse from the Netherlands who has provided medical outreach services to the region of Asuoso in Ghana throughout her career. Remmerswaal played a key role in the construction and opening of St. Theresa’s Hospital in Asuoso in 2016.

That is where the team from the Eye Institute has been traveling to regularly over the last decade – not as part of a grant-funded program or institutional mandate, but out of a shared recognition for the profound need for high-quality eye care in the region.

“St. Theresa’s Hospital has made incredible strides in improving the overall health of countless patients throughout the past decade, but with care for highly specialized ocular diseases like glaucoma only available in more urban regions like the capital, patients are often unable to seek the care they need due to geographic or financial barriers,” Dr. Mauger explained.

To bridge this gap, the Eye Institute has partnered with the team from St. Theresa’s Hospital to establish a multi-day clinic at the hospital, which delivers critical sight-saving surgeries and ocular disease management to local patients in need. Far from a solo effort, these medical missions serve as a vital hands-on training opportunity that introduces fellow WVU ophthalmologists to global medical outreach.

“Global ophthalmology initiatives like the work we do in Ghana provide a unique learning opportunity for our team members as it exposes them to a wide range of complex diseases that they wouldn’t usually see at the Eye Institute, while they learn how to practice in a new environment with fewer available resources,” Mauger said. “This requires them to practice new diagnostic treatment methods and surgical techniques, helping them become more well-rounded and independent ophthalmologists.”

When Mauger returned to Asuoso for his most recent trip in October 2025, he was accompanied by Assistant Professor Evan Frigoletto, M.D., and Vitreoretinal Fellow Ami Patel, M.D. Together over five days, the team treated 201 patients, consisting of 120 glaucoma laser surgeries, 59 cataract surgeries, 10 pterygium procedures, and 12 additional non-surgical treatments.

For Dr. Frigoletto, who joined the Eye Institute faculty in 2025 following his graduation from the Cornea Fellowship Program, this marked his first opportunity to practice ophthalmology outside the United States and the standard hospital system.

“Having trained under Dr. Mauger during my residency and fellowship, I was particularly honored to work alongside him as a colleague in Asuoso and contribute to his personal mission of eradicating preventable blindness on a global scale,” Frigoletto said. “It required a lot of long hours and hard work, but seeing the look on a patient’s face after they receive a treatment that they previously thought they would have to go a lifetime without makes it all worth it.”

Frigoletto explained that he was originally supposed to make the trip to Ghana while he was a fellow, but that it had to be pushed back several months due to scheduling reasons. Attending as a faculty member instead of a trainee, however, afforded him the opportunity to become more involved in the process of planning the trip, a role he said he hopes to reassume in the future.

“I’ve been interested in becoming involved in global ophthalmology outreach initiatives since beginning my training at the Eye Institute several years ago, and am very proud to have finally made that goal a reality through this initiative in Ghana. I hope I can continue to contribute to this cause and other similar outreach initiatives in the future, as part of my commitment to the Eye Institute’s overarching mission of preventing blindness and providing the best vision care possible to all patients.”

The team from the Eye Institute typically makes the trip to St. Theresa’s Hospital every other year and hopes to return to the region in 2028.

To learn more about outreach initiatives at the Eye Institute and Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, visit medicine.hsc.wvu.edu/eye/outreach.