Eyeglasses for Global Development: Bridging the Visual Divide, released by EYElliance and World Economic Forum, demonstrates how providing eyeglasses to those who need them can improve educational outcomes, increase productivity, and stimulate the global economy.
The report draws on expertise from over 35 interviews with eye care and education NGOs, health economists, private sector actors, and bi- and multilateral institutions to outline the guiding principles of successful models, identify barriers to scale, and provide opportunities for engagement and collaboration across sectors to help close the gap in access to eyeglasses.
Published in January 2011, the International Core Curriculum for Refractive Error focuses on providing training materials for eye care professionals, with the ultimate goal of eliminating or reducing uncorrected refractive error. This resource is available in English and French.
The curriculum is designed to provide learners with content domains or categories and the appropriate performance objectives to perform their eye care job tasks.
The knowledge, skills, and interpersonal behaviors required are focused on the following three core competencies:
These competencies are organized into the following five sections with corresponding performance objectives:
The curriculum was developed by the International Council of Ophthalmology (ICO) and the Joint Commission on Allied Health Personnel in Ophthalmology (JCAHPO), written by Dr. Mohammed Babar Qureshi, Chair of the Uncorrected Refractive Error Task Force; Dr. Mark O.M. Tso, ICO Director for Education; Dr. William F. Astle, Chair of the ICO Task Force on Para-Ophthalmic Vision Specialist Education (now Allied Health Education); Dr. Lynn Anderson, Executive Director of JCAHPO; Dr. William H. Ehlers; and Dr. Peter C. Donshik.
The ICO Task Force on Uncorrected Refractive Errors and School Eye Health was formed in 2007 to strengthen the involvement of the ophthalmic profession, in cooperation with others, to provide better access to high quality, low-cost eye care, especially to regions with limited services.
Learning Document
The Task Force held its last meeting in February 2016, where it launched the Learning Document. This resource presents the lessons learned from the Task Force’s eight years of work and experiences. The Task Force would like to acknowledge Light for the World for their significant support over the years.
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