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.
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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
This review highlighted significant gaps in engaging marginalised communities, such as women and people with disabilities, despite them experiencing higher rates of blindness and vision impairment. These findings will be used in our ongoing efforts to support vulnerable communities to access eye care through our projects around the world, and we hope other eye care organisations, governments and service providers will respond to the calls of this review to better engage and empower communities to deliver integrated and people-centred eye care programs – Elise Moo, Global Research Coordinator
Ling Lee
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Integrated people-centered eye care: A scoping review on engaging communities in eye care in low- and middle-income settings, PLoS ONE, January 2023, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278969.
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