The Surgilens surgical microscope was developed out of a need for inexpensive field microscopes capable of both eye and general surgery needs.

 

The Surgilens microscope runs entirely off-grid, has a 24 hour battery life, is fully solar chargeable, comes standard with teaching LCD screen and recording camera, surgeon’s chair, easy to repair, and true co-axial surgical lighting. Current portables run anywhere between 15-20k.

 

We are currently fundraising to mass-produce these microscopes and distribute them at cost for all missionary physicians and hospitals. With donor support, our program hopes to be able to offer these scopes at 2-3k each.

Most surgical microscopes that are donated or purchased from a hospital are quite big and must be shipped by shipping container. If your mission hospital has a shipping container and is donated a surgical microscope then we believe that is a great option.

 

It is important to keep in mind that these surgical microscopes are quite difficult to service and maintain. Although we have many partners and connections that can service them, it is difficult to do remotely and we advise a complete inspection before deployment as it will likely be very hard to repair a full-size surgical microscope in the field.

 

Currently we no longer send these big microscopes, even if donated for free. We prefer to exchange them for our newest portable microscope.

When in doubt surgical loops are a great alternative and device for most surgical applications.

 

There are a variety of brands and most traveling mission surgeons have already been fitted and tried out brands they like so we won’t bother going into the different ones.

 

We will say that even the cheapest dental student loupes at $80 are enough to do a surprising amount of work. If using loupes, make sure you have back-up batteries as these often seem to go out when you need them in the mission field.