Aim
This Collaborative aims to facilitate partner hospitals to set-up and efficiently run IT enabled vision centres.
Why Vision Centres?
Vision centres are emerging as an integral part of eye care ecosystem. With right approach, telemedicine and IT support these centres can effectively function as extended outpatient facility offering comprehensive care to the entire service area population. In a shortrun these centres substantially contribute to the surgical and specialty volumes of a eye hospital.
What this collaborative offers?
- Personalised technical support for each enrolled hospital for a period of one year
- Strengthen base hospital support for vision centres
- Support to build HR competencies, assessing staff skills and framework for continuous education
- Inputs on demand generation and strengthening follow up care
- Development of protocols for comprehensive eye care delivery at vision centres
A success story of vision centres from Aravind:
Aravind Eye Hospital in Theni (Tamilnadu) manages a network of 7 vision centres catering to the eye care needs of half a million people. In 2019, these vision centres contributed to 27% of the hospital’s total cataract surgical volume. On an average each centre dispensed 1,370 spectacles and contributed 320 cataract surgeries during the year. One-third of patients referred for cataract surgery from these vision centres underwent the surgeries under the paying section. The case finding cost for cataract surgeries referred through vision centres was zero as compared to INR 300 to 500 (USD 4 to 7) per surgery incurred through outreach services.
Vision centres are proven to be a successful strategy for providing comprehensive primary eye care across the world. The following are some of the key features of vision centres:
- Being locally available, VCs ensure access to care
- Provides comprehensive eye care at a significantly low cost to the Institution and the patient – patients can save the cost of travelling to an eye hospital in a distant town along with an attender and lost wages.
- Enhance spectacle sales and uptake of surgeries. Based on Aravind’s experience, a vision centre from its third year of operations, would sell 1,000 spectacles and have 300 patients undergo cataract surgeries, annually.
- Builds and sustains goodwill for the organization in the rural communities
- VCs contribute greatly towards reducing carbon footprints by cutting down the need for travel.
During the year-long collaboration, the Participant Teams would aim to establish and efficiently run enable vision centres, through the following steps:
THIS COLLABORATIVE IS FOR YOU IF…
… You are an eye hospital/eye care institution that want to establish new vision centres in the next few months
(You may require resources to invest in infrastructure, equipment, training, software and IT infrastructure to establish at least one new vision centre in four months time since the start of the collaborative)
ENROLL AS A TEAM
Each participating eye hospital should designate a team consisting of:
- Organisation Leader
- Senior Executive / Administrator / Hospital Manager
- Ophthalmologist
- Optometrist
Course fee:
- India and Nepal: INR 118,000 (Inclusive of GST) per team
- Other Countries: USD 1,593 (Inclusive of GST) per team
The fee will cover:
- 3 online learning sessions.
- Yearlong offline guidance from the LAICO Team
- Structured monthly calls to follow – up progress and to support the implementation of strategies developed by the participants.
- Periodic webinars (minimum 2) on selected topics that will add value to the participants.
