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WCO delegates urged to promote growing optometric charity
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MEXICO CITY – Here at the World Council of Optometry general delegates meeting, Australian optometrist Brien A. Holden, PhD, DSc, LOSc, asked the members to return to their respective countries and sign up the leaders of optometry to support Optometry Giving Sight.
Optometry Giving Sight (OGS) was formed several years ago by the World Optometry Foundation, the International Centre for Eyecare Education (ICEE) and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness to organize worldwide efforts and raise funds to eliminate uncorrected refractive error.
According to Prof. Holden, every member of the WCO governing board made a donation during the Mexico City meeting. The unanimous support of the WCO board will go a long way to influence other potential donors, he said.
Many of WCO’s programs support not only services but the development of infrastructures for providing vision care in areas of need around the world. “It’s not just service delivery,” Dr. Holden told the delegates. “It’s about creating capacity. In Sri Lanka when the war broke out, we couldn’t go back, but those we trained continued to see 1,000 people per month.”
| Vision Source docs make commitment to OGS | |
| By Nancy Hemphill, ELS DALLAS – One week before the World Council of Optometry delegates meeting, more than 200 Vision Source members pledged nearly $200,000 a year to Optometry Giving Sight in addition to raising $42,000 at an auction here at the Vision Source North American Meeting. According to an OGS press release, Vision Source CEO, Glenn Ellisor, OD, said the group would continue to work with OGS to help it meet its target of having 500 Vision Source members actively supporting the OGS Leaders Campaign ($100 per month) by the end of the year. “As more optometrists and their patients lend support to OGS, more corporate entities, governments and institutional funding sources will be encouraged to match their contributions, sometimes at ratios as much as 10 to one,” said Brien A. Holden, PhD, DSc, LOSc, in the press release. “The multiplier effect of every donation from a single doctor or their practice can be huge.” Vision Source is a group of 3,000 independent optometrists in the United States in Canada. For more information: |
Prof. Holden said one of the initial goals for OGS is to raise $30 million per year over the next 5 years. “We can eliminate blindness and impaired vision due to refractive error for 300 million people by 2020,” he said. “It’s not that expensive, approximately $3 to $5 per person, to create 10,000 vision centers to see 30 million people a year.”
According to Prof. Holden, on World Sight Day last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a press release stating that 153 million people around the world were blind or visually impaired due to uncorrected refractive error. “Children fail at school, adults are unable to work and, as a result, families are pushed into poverty,” he said. “These figures do not include the 150 to 500 million who have significantly impaired vision because they don’t have reading glasses.”
The National Eye Institute and the WHO are planning studies around the world to determine how many people do not have reading glasses and need them, Prof. Holden continued. “I can tell you from the work we’ve done in South Africa and in Sri Lanka, 90% of the people who need reading glasses don’t have them,” he said.
OGS has been introduced in only five countries so far, Prof. Holden said. “We’re trying to find out how to make it work in the 80 countries in which WCO is active,” he said. “If we get Australia, Holland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States rolling, we’re in good shape.”
OGS will concentrate on three projects in 2007: Giving Sight to Blind Children in Africa, Vision for Sri Lanka and the National Refractive Error Program for South Africa. OGS funded workers from ICEE and SightSavers have gone into blind schools in Africa and have found that one-third of the children were not, in fact, blind, they just had high refractive errors.
Outgoing WCO President Victor Connors, OD, also urged the WCO delegates to support OGS. “Together we have a social and professional responsibility to do what each of us can to ensure that all in our community at large have access to and receive the gift of sight,” he said. “Every one of us had that moment when you put those glasses on someone for the first time and they can see the leaves on the trees. They can see their world. Now we have the opportunity to ensure that all in our world have that chance.”
For more information:
- Optometry Giving Sight can be reached at 8360 Old York Rd., Ste. 418, Elkins Park, PA 19027; (215) 780-1321; usa@givingsight.org; www.givingsight.org. The World Council of Optometry can be reached at the same address; (215) 780-1320; www.worldoptometry.org.