The five-year Western Province Blindness Prevention Program aims to contribute towards eliminating avoidable blindness in the Rubavu District of the Western Province in Rwanda. Program objectives include: - To enhance the capacity of eye health personnel to deliver and manage eye health services - To ensure that the physical infrastructure, equipment and supply needs are addressed in the Rubavu District, to support the delivery of prevention of blindness services - To improve the quality, quantity and delivery of blindness services in the Rubavu District - To raise the profile of blindness as a public health issue and to build support for eye health programs in Rwanda
In Tanzania the Foundation supports a surgical training program for ophthalmology students to develop their capacity to provide high quality, low cost eye care services. In the rural areas of Moshi the program provides training, treatment and various operations at low cost so that the poor can also benefit.
The training also represents an opportunity to provide cataract services to people living outside the urban area of Dar Es Salaam, delivering accessible and affordable services to underprivileged and remote communities. The program covers the cost of outreach clinic medical staff, surgical items (such as intraocular lenses) and consumables, as well as training running costs. In Rwanda, given that there is lack of established eye care services in many rural and remote communities, it is essential that the program help build a strong outreach program and make available ophthalmologists to carry out treatment. They support outreach surgical campaigns to treat cataract blindness in the districts where they work.The program also supports a monthly clinic by a visiting ophthalmologist at the Gisenyi Eye Unit to treat people referred from outreach campaigns. Apart from that they train staff with access to the community - giving them the capacity to run eye screening programs and to ensure people are referred for further assessment when necessary. They helped train nurses and health workers who run screening programs across several districts in the Western Province, and refer people to the Gisenyi Eye Unit as the only available eye care service where they too operate.
The program is currently working with the Muhororo Eye Unit in the neighbouring district of Ngororero, supporting renovations and the supply of basic equipment. This district currently has very limited eye care services.
Since 2005 The Fred Hollows Foundation's assistance to Tanzania, it has been in partnership with the Kilimanjaro College of Community Ophthalmology (KCCO). The Foundation supports a series of courses in management for eye care personnel over three years in partnership with KCCO. Course participants include eye health personnel and ophthalmologists working in Africa as heads of clinical departments or eye hospitals. Since 2006 the Fred Hollows Foundation in Australia established a five-year project in Rwanda to provide eye health services in remote areas of the country, training for health workers in vision and eye health screening and eye unit renovations. The Western Province Blindness Prevention Program aims to contribute towards eliminating avoidable blindness in the Rubavu District of the Western Province in Rwanda.
This program has served more than 11,000 people in Tanzania.
