For example, the quality of outcomes for cataract and trichiasis surgery is unacceptable in many countries and standards of surgery have to be improved.Purpose. But quality and access have to receive even greater attention than previously. Why do so many people still turn to traditional treatments rather than seek out the eye units that VISION 2020 has so busily promoted? There are many reasons and this is not the place to investigate them in detail. Training is an important aspect of this but only one part of a complex jigsaw that includes wider policy issues such as staff retention and motivation, deployment to rural areas, the ‘brain drain’ to high-income countries and/or private practice, and so on.Īnother important area to consider is the creation of consumer demand for eye health services. Human resource development for eye health must receive even greater emphasis in the second decade of VISION 2020. More advocacy and more targeted research to prove our case (see article on page 43) are vital to our future progress.īut even if we were able to get more money, would countries have the capacity to absorb it and actually deliver the much-needed eye health services? Sadly, the answer is no in many countries - because of the chronic shortage of eye health workers. This will require extensive advocacy work, itself based on sound evidence, to influence and change the minds of policy makers around the world, most of whom presently see blindness as a low priority. The way forward will require us to build upon existing success, to ‘scale up’ what we are already doing (by going from project level to full country-wide programmes), and to adopt new strategies where progress has been slower than hoped.įor VISION 2020, increasing the available financial resources to implement national VISION 2020 plans and to bring good quality, equitable eye health services to the poorest communities is one very obvious area that requires our focus going forward. If these figures are confirmed, and if we take into account that, over the same period, there has been an 18% increase in the population of those aged 50 years and older worldwide, then we have some cause for optimism.īut much more needs to be done if we are to achieve our overall objective. The number of blind people (≤3/60, presenting vision) has fallen from an estimated 45 million to 39.8 million. Overall, this is a decrease of nearly 29 million. Compared to the 314 million people with visual impairment (≤6/18) from WHO data produced in 2004, the new figures suggest a total of 285 million. It suggests a decline of approximately 10% in the overall number of blind and visually impaired. Although still to be finally approved by WHO, some preliminary data on the global prevalence of blindness and visual impairment was presented in a meeting between WHO and IAPB members in October 2010. The success of VISION 2020 has to be judged against its impact on reducing levels of avoidable blindness in the world. This is a good time to take stock of what we have achieved and what still needs to be done. We have just passed the halfway mark for the VISION 2020 global initiative, which was launched in 1999 with the goal to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020.
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