Read a testimony from an Operation Eyesight-trained Vision Technician: 

After decades of success using this method, we have been invited by ministries of health to present it as a proven way of addressing gaps in current eye health offerings in a number of countries, including Zimbabwe, Malawi, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. After seeing the impact of our programs on the lives of their citizens, we have been asked by the governments of Zambia and Arunachal Pradesh state in India to replicate our model in other parts of the country/state. In doing so, we share the principles of our model while still leaving room for adaptation to best meet local eye health needs and to successfully operate in the local cultural context. We also provide input on governments’ national eye health strategies, advocating for the inclusion of eye health in primary health care programs. This is a critical component of achieving universal health coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Read about a day in the life of an Operation Eyesight program officer: 

As a result of longstanding, trusting relationships that we have with our partners and with local ministries of health, we were able to adapt our approach quickly at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our locally-based program teams quickly mobilized to help our partners address the immediate concerns caused by the pandemic. This included reaching out to communities to provide clean water, safety supplies and education to help them protect their families and prevent the spread of the virus. These efforts helped prevent our partner hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, giving them support to help them get back to a state where they are facilitating better health outcomes, including eye health, for their citizens. The flexibility shown by our international team demonstrated that we have an important role to play to help our hospital partners manage health risks as they emerge, even those unrelated to eye health. 

COVID-19 proved that access to health care and robust health systems are more important now than ever. That’s why our focus this year and beyond is to continue our work to strengthen hospitals, establish vision centres and improve access to eye health care. Our work would not be possible without support from our generous donors. Donate today to help us support our hospital partners and eliminate avoidable blindness. – For All the World To See!  

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Great examples of this occur in our  programs in Ghana and Kenya, where we partner with Seeing is Believing to eliminate avoidable blindness by integrating primary eye care into the primary health care system.

Thanks to support from donors like you, our eye care programs are hard at work within the countries’ existing health structures and systems. We help hospitals help themselves by identifying gaps in human resources and improving facilities; and we work with communities to target their specific eye care needs and empower them to take ownership of their eye health.

By educating staff members at partner hospitals on all aspects of eye health care, we help instill appreciation of the importance of the eye care programs they’re helping to implement. This builds the staff’s pride and ownership of their work!

This approach has served us well in reducing costs and improving patient services, while ensuring the continuity of the project. Our sustainable practices ensure our programs – and the community benefits they provide – last well after funding has ended.

Because of donors like you, we’re able to implement cost-effective programs that eliminate avoidable blindness on a sustainable basis. Thanks to you, we’re one step closer to realizing this exciting vision − For All The World To See!

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Since we announced our first avoidable blindness-free village in 2014, it’s no secret that Operation Eyesight’s work takes place at the community level. That’s where ending avoidable blindness begins, as part of our approach to provide education about eye health and create lasting eye health care.

But as we’ve learned, it isn’t enough to simply approach a community with these objectives. In the past, when we’ve done this, decisions were largely made by our partner hospitals on behalf of the people living in the community. This turned out to be a major barrier to achieving our objectives. We’ve realized that community participation in any project is a critical part of the program.

Upper Tepesia in India’s Assam state is a great example of this approach, which we call Participatory Approach to Community Eye Health (PACEH). In this village, like in other communities, staff members from Operation Eyesight and hospital partners visited the area to understand the actual needs of the community and seek the community’s input.

This input is combined with data about the prevalence of blindness, socio-economic status and eye care availability and is used to tailor our approach. We were pleased to declare Upper Tepesia an avoidable blindness-free village on September 10, 2015!

We also follow PACEH when it comes to Vision Centres, which are permanent, staffed eye care service centres. When establishing a Vision Centre, there is a long list of criteria we use, but our staff also visit the location and meet with community members. This ensures our Vision Centres are placed for maximum effectiveness.

Because we believe in involving communities in the design and implementation of projects that impact their wellbeing, we use PACEH in all of our Indian projects. With PACEH and our donors’ support, we’ll help make many more villages like Upper Tepesia free of avoidable blindness!

We hope you will consider ‘adopting’ a community’s eye care needs today. Thank you for your support as we work to eliminate avoidable blindness once and for all!

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For years now, we’ve known that next to cataracts, the second leading cause of avoidable blindness in developing countries throughout the world is failed cataract surgeries. It’s a terrible shame. And yet, it continues!

The practice of offering substandard care to eye patients is fueled by the urgency to reduce the huge crowd of people still waiting for cataract surgery. But there is another way to look at this, and that is through the eyes of people threatened by blindness.

In my last blog post, I asked you to picture a poor Indian woman who is going blind from cataracts. If we could actually take the time to know her, we would learn why she refused free medical help. We may discover that she has some questions of her own, such as, “Why are you offering to do this for me?” and “Can I really trust you?”

We got to know thousands of others with similar stories. We did it by recruiting people from these same villages and teaching them about basic eye care. These Community Health Workers were trained to take this knowledge back to their villages and share it with the people. We learned a lot from the people, and they learned a lot of about eye health and the hospitals that wanted to help them.

For the hospitals we support, the concept and practice of quality permeates the whole organization. What I described in the last paragraph is quality that cannot be easily measured: service to individuals, trust and respect. This goes hand-in-hand with quality that can be measured: hospital cleanliness, clinical outcomes, infection rates, etc.

If these hospitals follow accepted international protocols and standards, failures from infection are kept to a minimum. This translates into good outcomes, and word gets around – reputation and trust is built. Out in the surrounding villages, the community workers help alleviate patients’ fears, and they facilitate the process of diagnosis, treatment and recovery.

This cycle of relationship and healing just keeps rolling along, contributing to sustainability. In fact, we have a saying: “Sustainability is a by-product of quality.” And that is how avoidable blindness is reduced in an entire district – people within reach of the hospital have the opportunity to get the help they need, and blindness that can be treated or prevented becomes a thing of the past.

At Operation Eyesight, we are also working to eliminate the backlog of people who are blind from cataracts. But our commitment to the poor of India and Africa requires that we take their needs and fears seriously.

That tribal woman I mentioned? She can see now. And she says thanks.

Learn more about the difference our Community Health Workers are making!

The post We must see through their eyes (Part 2 of 2) appeared first on Operation Eyesight.