Award winning Auckland architect Pete Bossley helping to restore sight in the Pacific Islands

The Fred Hollows Foundation is working with award winning Auckland architect Pete Bossley to create innovative, modular eye clinics for the Pacific Islands. The clinics, which will be environmentally friendly and easily transportable to remote communities, will allow The Foundation to reach thousands more people in desperate need of sight-restoring surgery. 

The Fred Hollows Foundation has been working in the Pacific since 2002 where more than 80,000 people remain needlessly blind, mostly from cataracts. To date The Foundation has trained over 100 eye health workers from 11 Pacific countries at The Pacific Eye Institute in Suva, a purpose built training facility they established in 2006.

"The challenge now is to provide our graduate eye doctors and nurses with well-equipped eye clinics," says Andrew Bell, Program Director at The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ. "Too often our graduates are returning home to work in eye clinics no bigger than broom closets. Some have even resorted to setting up small clinics in crowded hospital corridors."

Adding to the challenge is the fact that building in the Pacific is very expensive and there is a shortage of local tradespeople with the skills needed to construct surgical theatres.

With the help of Pete Bossley, The Foundation has found a uniquely Kiwi solution.

Bossley's modular eye clinics are not only ‘green' and suited to the Pacific climate - they can be flat-packed for easy transportation to remote communities, can be assembled without the use of heavy machinery and can be tailored to suit any site, large or small. The biggest of Bossley's three designs incorporates six clinical rooms for screening patients and a two bed theatre, whilst the smallest consists of three clinical rooms with the option of adding on a one or two bed theatre.

"It is a privilege to design buildings which will benefit people in a number of ways" says Mr Bossley. "The combination of New Zealand experience and local input will help integrate these buildings into their communities, and will offer great support for patients, surgical teams, educators, and others in ways which will hopefully expand once the potential becomes more fully realised."

The Foundation prides itself on its innovative approach to providing eye care in a very geographically challenging part of the world, and is delighted with Bossley's design.

"Many remote communities in the Pacific have no permanent eye doctor, let alone a permanent eye clinic, and our graduate eye nurses rely on visits from The Foundation's surgical outreach teams who have to carry in heavy equipment and supplies by boat," says Mr Bell. "The modular clinics will also serve as a base for our teams, allowing them to spend less time setting up and dismantling equipment, and more time restoring sight."

The project is still in its early stages but both The Foundation and Pete Bossley Architects (with the support of the Stanley Group and e Cubed Building Workshop) are committed to making it happen and extending The Foundation's reach across the Pacific region. They are currently seeking funding to build modular eye clinics for Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

"The beauty of the design concept is that it could have multiple applications," says Mr Bell. "The modular buildings could be used as schools, government offices, emergency centres for disaster relief or as temporary housing for peacekeepers."

Pete Bossley Architects have won numerous awards for their work, and specialise in residential, art galleries and museums, and the sport and entertainment sector. They recently designed the expansion of the Voyager Maritime Museum in Auckland. Pete Bossley, while Design Director at Jasmax Architects, was the principal jointly in charge of the design of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington.

To find out more visit www.bossleyarchitects.co.nz