|
|
|
|
|
|
| NEED FOR VISION CENTRES | |
|
Muralidharan Prasanth MHA
It has been estimated that in India, around 80% of the blindness prevalence is in the rural population, where as more than 70% of the available ophthalmologists are either doing private practice or associated with Non Governmental Organisations in the urban areas. The number of secondary and tertiary eye care centres and the community outreach activities has increased considerably in the last few years in our country. But the utilization of services still remains low in the rural areas. There is a vaccum existing due to the lack of organized primary eye care. A recent study conducted by Aravind Eye Hospital has revealed that the uptake of eye care services in the camps is just 7% of potential population even though camps are being conducted at regular intervals. The fact that people do not make use of the available eye care facilities proactively is attributed to various reasons. This included financial as well as psychological aspects. The financial factors are unaffordability of the services, indirect cost incurred in terms of travel, lost wage of accompanying person. Psychological factors refers to the fear of surgery, unwillingness to go to the hospital at a distant place, long waiting time before and after consultation, going for follow up etc. Moreover, the government run hospitals are very less and the private institutions are not easily accessible and affordable for the rural community. Realising these facts, Vision 2020-the right to sight envisaged the model of Vision Centres in which the main focus is to create permanent access to primary eye care services for the rural communities at an affordable cost. These centres manned by well-trained paramedical personnel are connected through Information Technology to the base hospital which is a secondary centre. This makes it possible for the patients to have direct consultation and interaction with the ophthalmologist which will give them better satisfaction. After this, those who require surgery or speciality consultations will only be referred to the base hospitals. The Present approach in the National Action Plan, gives more emphasis to setting up Vision Centres under Comprehensive Eye Care Model in rural areas. Thus, in addition to screening eye diseases at an early stage and providing remedial measures and timely referrals to secondary and tertiary hospitals, these centres have many other activities such as vision testing & dispensing of spectacles, school eye screening programmes, eye health education, identifying and training of volunteers etc. Every Vision Centre can cater to the needs of a service population of 50,000. In this regard India will require more than 20,000 Vision Centres to fulfill the goals of Vision 2020. The impact of the Vision Centres in improving the eye care service delivery can be viewed from two different perspectives. From the community perspective, the primary eye care facilities become available at their door steps at an affordable cost. The eye care needs of the local community are better addressed by the Vision Centre in terms of conducting screening camps, education and training programmes. From the providers perspective, the over crowding in the secondary and tertiary centres can be minimized since a lot of primary screening and filtering are done in the Vision Centres. This enables the hospitals to give better attention to the patients who really need advance care. In short, if well implemented, the concept of Vision Centres will surely have a great impact in changing the passive health seeking behaviour of the people of India. This will translate to the improved efficiency of the entire eye care delivery system thereby achieving the goals of Vision 2020. |
|
|
|
|