Eye Health Hero: Vijay K Sarvepally

Vijay K Sarvepally has over ten years of progressive experience in eye care service delivery, strategic program development, management, coordination and advocacy towards elimination of avoidable blindness programmes. He holds graduate degree in Optometry & Vision Sciences from, BITS Pilani. He also holds a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology. As a clinical eye care practitioner, his areas of expertise include Therapeutic & Advanced Contact Lens Practice, Paediatric eye Care, Diabetic Retinopathy & Community Eye Health. He has been actively involved in teaching diplomat & graduate Optometry students and Post graduate Ophthalmology Students.
In the current position, he is responsible for strategic direction and oversight of all Community Eye Care programme activities conducted by PVRI in both states of Andhra Pradesh & Telangana. Besides the regular clinical practice, his current work includes implementing Strategic programme models in reducing the avoidable blindness in the remote and unreached areas of Telangana & Andhra Pradesh. Recently the Government of Telangana has nominated him as the Chief Technical Advisor of prestigious KantiVelugu Programme an initiative of Government of Telangana, universal eye health programme.

He has been involved in many Public Health Research Projects conducted by PVRI in Collaboration with Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), International Centre for Eye Health (ICEH) London, and London School of Hygiene & Topical Medicine (UK), Sightsavers International (USA), Operation Eye Sight Universal (Canada), Essilor Vision Foundation (France) & GGP project (Japan). He has presented his research work on various national and international scientific platforms. He is a Doctoral Scholar at MLCU, pursing his PhD in Humanities and Social sciences.

In the capacity of Eye health educator, Vijay K Sarvepally has successfully trained around 500 ophthalmic personnel over the past 8 years, predominantly belonging to rural areas of south Indian states of Telangana & Andhra Pradesh. These 2 year trained ophthalmic personnel, would then go back to their villages and start the eye screening center and provide quality eye care services. These students become the referral networks for the base hospital, training center for referring surgical cases to the hospital. They would receive the monetary incentives from the base Hospital for each referral. They make lucrative revenue through their centres by managing the refractive error corrections by dispensing spectacles. 65% of these personnel constitute women.

“Vijay K Sarvepally has also been involved in developing active strategic plans towards eradication of avoidable blindness within the rural areas of south Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. He as been appointed as the chief technical advisor for the prestigious “Kanti Velugu Programme” an universal eye screening programme conducted by Government of Telangana. He has designed the active model for screening 35 million population in just six months.”

– Vijay K Sarvepally