India has made good progress in reducing avoidable blindness through the efforts of NPCB&VI, yet permanent access to quality eye care in rural and underserved areas remains a challenge.
To bridge this gap, Aravind Eye Care System, setup telemedicine-enabled Vision Centres (VCs) since 2004 and scaled to 119 covering a population of 12 million. These centres now provide comprehensive primary eye care to millions of people every year.
Through its training and consulting arm, Lions Aravind Institute of Community Ophthalmology, Aravind has supported several hospitals, state governments like Tamilnadu, Chhattisgarh, Tripura and government of Bangladesh to set up and run vision centres successfully. Based on this experience, LAICO in collaboration with NPCB&VI is planning a two days consultation on Scaling of technology enabled vision centres integrated within the public health system across Indian states.
- Orientating State Programme Officers to the technology-enabled primary eye care model (Vision Centres) and its impact
- Providing technical guidance to set up Vision Centres (equipment, electronic medical records, telemedicine application, and HR training)
- Supporting the scaling up of telemedicine-enabled Vision Centres across the states
- Sharing impact of technology enabled Vision Centres and how it enables achieving universal eye health in their service area
- Scope of Integrating the Vision centres in Government health systems and scaling
- Need for integrated primary eye care
- Vision Centre Model and Management
- Standard Clinical Protocols at Vision Centres
- Preparing HR to deliver quality eye care at Vision Centres
- Role of Technology in providing comprehensive eye care at VCs
- Visit to Vision Centres for detail observation
- Supply Chain Management and Optical Management
- Key factors contributing to successful functioning of Vision Centres
- Role of Vision Centres in achieving universal eye health
- Preparations for successful implementation
- State governments pursue the interest and idea of setting up Tech enabled Vision Centres and taking it forward in their respective states
- Within two years the state would have set up at least 10 Vision Centres with in the public health system and ready to scale up
- At least 10 States adopted the model and scaled to the entire state by 2028.
Mohammed Gowth
Senior Faculty
Aravind Eye Care System – LAICO
72, Kuruvikaran Salai, Gandhi Nagar,
Madurai – 625 020, Tamil Nadu
+(91) 452-4356-500 (Exn : 560)
mohammed@aravind.org