Medical Retina Fellowship review @ Sankara Eye Hospital, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Duration: 18 months.

First 6 months: general posting in the morning half. 

Retina dept: Free hands in all lasers, investigations and seeing patients.

Once a week online combined class would be there where all-India Sankara fellows and faculties join. Otherwise it's mostly self-learning. But if you are putting efforts from your side, medical retina learning is always possible in Sankara because of the free hands in patients.

Retina department consultants are approachable and friendly. Though cataract OT side can get difficult to work with at times, retina department is chill.

You will have to go for camps once or twice a month in the first 1 year. Night duty once in a month in the first 6 months.

You get cataract (SICS) from 3rd month. The numbers will depend upon your speed and how you pick up. Phaco is given in the last 3 months. 1 per OT turn or so. 

Can expect to do around 600 to 1000 SICS and 20 to 50 phacos by the end of your fellowship.

There is no single trainer to teach you all the steps systematically.

For a person who hasn't had much cataract exposure in PG and wants to do cataract as a consultant along with medical retina, this would be a good stepping stone. Though they might need few more months of doing phaco from some charitable hospital or so to perfect it.

But if your cataract hands are already good, there wouldn't be much benefit doing this fellowship because you might not be able to upgrade your phaco skills even after 1.5 years.

Duty timings are usually from 9am to 6pm unless you have extra duty which is rare. Work life balance is good. They don't provide accommodation. But will give you temporary stay for few weeks till you find your own. Hospital has a decent canteen which provide vegetarian food.