Eye Care Everywhere: In The Community

Our Vision Centers help overcome the most difficult-to-overcome barriers to accessing eye care, including cost, proximity and gender disparity.

It's a revolutionary concept that presents an extraordinary opportunity to transform lives and give people a hand up by treating and preventing blindness and vision loss.

By expanding this model and bringing Vision Centers to more communities in need, we can not only give people their sight today, but we can build a legacy of quality eye care that will endure for generations to come.

Vision Centers are eye health clinics that are strategically located to be accessible to rural populations while still within reach of regional hospitals. They are often set up near well-trafficked shops and marketplaces to ensure people’s awareness of their services.

Staffed by one vision technician and one optician/glasses dispenser; these two positions can handle most eye health needs, from basic medicines to eyeglasses. Each trained employee can serve 5,000 patients per year. We work with partner organizations to ensure that staff are trained to top clinical standards, and extend ongoing training and mentorship through Cybersight, our telemedicine platform.

Slideshow: Inside our Vision Centers in India and Bangladesh

Whenever possible, Vision Centers are equipped with a computer and internet access so staff can hold live consultations with an ophthalmologist at a regional hospital as needed. Staff can also refer patients with more advanced vision problems to the regional hospital as necessary.

For the most complicated problems, the regional hospital refers patients to a central hospital, where the most skilled and experienced ophthalmologists practice. The system works in reverse, too: The regional or central hospital can refer patients to their local Vision Center for post-operative care, sparing them a time-consuming and expensive return trip to the hospital. This forms an efficient system that filters cases and directs them to the right level of care.

The centers help address another major challenge, as well: gender disparity. Approximately 139 million women and girls around the world are currently living with blindness and vision loss. That’s 25 million more than men and boys.

Orbis’s model for Vision Centers alleviates these barriers to care for women by making free and low-cost services available locally. With Vision Centers, women and girls need not travel long distances or let financial worries and childcare stand in the way of their right to sight. Moreover, we prioritize training for women and staff the Vision Centers with female employees whenever possible.

In fact, 65% of our existing centers are currently managed by women.

Having women staff the centers means that women in the community, who are discouraged from consulting with male medical practitioners, are free to go to the Vision Centers. It also offers aspiring women with career opportunities and a means to support their families.

Unable to see the blackboard, 14-year-old Anika was struggling to keep up in school. She told her parents and her teacher about her problem, but there was nothing to be done. The nearest eye hospital was a great distance away from the family’s home in rural Bangladesh, and they simply couldn’t afford to make the journey.

It’s a common story in low-resource countries like Bangladesh and India. The simple remedies that we often take for granted—a pair of eyeglasses, an antibiotic, some eye drops—are inaccessible, especially in rural communities, due to cost and distance. So instead people do their best to carry on without their eyesight, with heartbreaking consequences for themselves, their families, and their entire communities

Her parents heard about a new service in their community, the Grameen Singra Vision Center, where people could go to get basic eye care. They took Anika there, and her eyes were examined by a qualified ophthalmic technician.

The technician consulted via the internet with an ophthalmologist at the nearest hospital—the one that Anika’s family couldn’t afford to visit—and Anika was diagnosed with refractive error. She received an eyeglass prescription and a pair of spectacles, and now she can clearly see the blackboard at school.

While Anika's story has a happy ending. There are many more children just like Anika with undiagnosed refractive errors living in darkness needlessly and falling behind at school due to lack of access to quality eye care.

Will you join us and continue to ensure we can continue to make eye care available everywhere - regardless of where they live? Together, we can do it.