Before
Everything started from Conakry. When it came to identifying a location that could accommodate the first Voir La Vie ophthalmological unit on Guinean soil, it was in the capital that the research was directed. With the help of our local correspondent at the time, Bernard BRECHENADE and after several scouting trips led by the then President, Paul GIL, supported by René ANCEY, the Communal Medical Center “Les Flamboyants” was detected.
A large building built a few years earlier by an American NGO which withdrew before developing its health project, this building languished awaiting use.
Voir La Vie and the Guinean Ministry of Health established a memorandum of understanding assigning the CMC to the opening of the future ophthalmological unit and undertook the development and cleanliness work.
A few containers and installation missions later, the first private eye surgery unit was created in Guinea. Its reputation quickly went beyond its baptismal funds since Les Flamboyants was the first Guinean structure to treat cataracts by installing intra-capsular implants, a technique for replacing the crystalline lens with a lens.
Long before the creation of Cadesso, an ophthalmology training center which emerged in 2000 within the Donka hospital in Conakry, the Flamboyants served as an advanced base for the training of most general practitioners in the area. era who, lacking a professional training structure, still wanted to move towards ophthalmology.
Drs Ramata BALDE, Pierre-Louis LAMA, Mamadou SOW, among others, followed the training sessions that the volunteer surgeons of Voir La Vie carried out through monthly missions.
Thousands of operations and tens of thousands of consultations have, for years, referenced Les Flamboyants as the place of skills and development of eye care in Guinea.
NOW
Some time after acquiring its medical and financial autonomy, the management of the service largely failed and the structure lost its splendor. It was overtaken by other similar installations from structures that arrived in the capital to develop the private sector of ophthalmology.
Lapsed from 2010, we withdrew from Les Flamboyants in 2014, and transferred, as our establishment agreement obliges us to do, all of our equipment to the Guinean government for exploitation by them.
