Engaging communities in eye care: how can we learn, build on and avoid mistakes from the past

What is it about?

Community Engagement is a broad concept where relationships between health actors and community members are developed to work together on health-related issues. We wanted to get an overview of how communities in developing countries are engaged when implementing eye care. We explored a variety of eye care interventions including: health promotion and education, drug and supplement distribution, immunization campaigns, surveillance, screening and detection activities, and referral pathways. Despite often complex contexts we also identified common aspects that promote or hinder intervention implementation and sustainability.

Featured Image

Photo by Heather Suggitt on Unsplash

Photo by Heather Suggitt on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Almost everyone at some point in their life will require vision care, but vision loss primarily impacts populations in low resource settings. The World Health Organization has recently promoted ‘Integrated people-centred eye care’ (IPEC) to reduce the burden of vision loss with community engagement as one of the key pillars of the IPEC framework. Understanding what and how community engagement in eye care has been done before can provide a foundation to improve eye care provision and access by building on known successes and avoiding past mistakes.

Perspectives