Vacation is always a good opportunity for new experiences and go to different places. Halifax is a city in Nova Scotia, Atlantic coast of Canada. Away of tourist routes, this lovely and receptive place is home for 500 thousand people, and the location of Dalhousie University and Queen Elizabeth II Hospital, reference on health services for the people of that part of the country.

For two weeks, Gabriel Ayub visited the department of ophthalmology of the institution, specially the glaucoma sector. During his stay, he joined clinical, surgical and research meetings as an observer, and met well-known glaucoma specialists, such as Bal Chauhan, Paul Rafuse, Marcelo Nicolela, a Brazilian ophthalmologist, head of the department, that has been living in Halifax for almost 20 years, and Jayme Vianna, another Brazilian professor and the one that gave him the opportunity for his visit.

"Health care in Canada is fully public, which allows a good comparison between their system and our system. Despite of being a country with much more financial resources than ours, they face some similar problems, such as long time waiting for appointments and surgeries. On the other hand, they incorporated on their routine some high cost and high effective surgical devices, such as Baerveldt and Ahmed implants; new releases on terms of minimal invasive glaucoma surgeries, like iStent and XEN; and much more OCT devices for use on patient examination on clinics", said Ayub.

Acording Ayub, the research sector counts with a team of staffs fully dedicated to make all the projects possible, helping on calling the patients for appointments, and doing exams for evaluation. They has some of the best equipment, newly released, such as Compass Visual Field and OCT-angiography. This entire infrastructure provides the department the base for a research of good quality, with their team publishing lots of papers on international journals every year.

"Unicamp and Dalhousie together have been developing research projects in glaucoma for a long time. That they keep contributing with each other on other future projects as well, opening doors for more international experiences", explain Ayub.