Commonwealth Health Partnerships & Avoidable Blindness

Commonwealth Health Partnerships 2014, the essential overview of health in the Commonwealth, has a great paper on Avoidable Blindness.

Put together by the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust with significant inputs from IAPB, the article gives a great overview of the situation on the Commonwealth countries, IAPB and the Trust’s efforts to address them and the impact that the Commonwealth can have on global prevalence of avoidable blindness. The full article is available on the Commonwealth Health website.

A big push on the prevention of avoidable blindness will yield major gains. To sustain these gains, eyecare must be permanently strengthened, not separate from but as part of health care, and made accessible to all – this is the way forward.

…[The Global Action Plan has] a global target of a reduction in prevalence of avoidable blindness and low vision by 25 per cent by 2019, from the baseline of 2010. For the Commonwealth this means we need to reduce the number of persons with blindness or low vision to no more than 78 million by the year 2019, some 20 million fewer than there are now.

A must read.