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Optometry Giving Sight chair asks for participation
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BOSTON – Australian optometrist Brien A. Holden, PhD, DSc, OAM, urged his American colleagues to open their hearts and wallets for the global Optometry Giving Sight charity during the American Optometric Association House of Delegates meeting here at Optometry’s Meeting.
“This is your program,” Prof. Holden, global chair of Optometry Giving Sight (OGS), urged. “This is optometry stepping up and saying we will eliminate avoidable blindness and impaired vision due to uncorrected refractive error.”
Optometry Giving Sight 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. The global fundraising initiative began 15 months ago in the United States and has a goal to raise $1.5 billion for the cause.
Prof. Holden told the delegates about a new program called the “World Sight Day Challenge,” which will take place this year on Oct. 11. For the challenge, Prof. Holden is asking optometrists across the United States to get involved with fundraising.
He then played a short video showing people in Third World countries getting spectacles, some of them classified as legally blind, who were able to see clearly for the first time in their lives.
“It’s our chance to make a real contribution to making poverty history,” Prof. Holden said. “We are looking to American optometrists to lead the world in this challenge.”
Optometrists have been signing up at a rate of 500 doctors every 6 months, Prof. Holden told PRIMARY CARE OPTOMETRY NEWS. Many practices give regularly, contribute the day’s revenues on World Sight Day to the charity or ask for donations from patients.
According to the OGS Web site, 250 million people around the world are blind or visually impaired because they do not have access to an eye exam and a pair of glasses. “Children fail at school, adults are unable to work and, as a result, families are pushed into poverty,” Prof. Holden said on World Sight Day last year. “These figures do not include the 150 to 500 million who have significantly impaired vision because they don’t have reading glasses.”
OGS is concentrating on three projects this year: 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.
Prof. Holden said he hopes optometrists will be moved into action. “We anticipate this will accelerate as we get the message out that this is not just another project but a collaborative world initiative to eliminate 20% of blindness and 60% of vision impairment for those most desperately in need,” he said.