How Can Hospital Programs be Strengthened to Enhance Achievement of VISION 2020 Objectives?

The global initiative, “VISION 2020 – The Right to Sight” aims to eliminate avoidable blindness by year 2020. Avoidable blindness by definition are those conditions for which we already have a treatment or a surgical procedure and often a proven strategy to either prevent or cure the condition. Thus, the challenge to realize this goal would be designing the right service delivery systems specific to the local context, organizing the required resources, coordination, and implementing and monitoring these. The key “discipline” that is required to ensure successful implementation is “Management.” To be holistic, such management inputs are required both in a program as well as the hospital setting. From a program perspective, the focus will need to be on reaching the unreached, ensuring equity, creating an enabling environment, putting in place the required infrastructure, including that for developing all cadres of the eye care team, and functionally integrating eye care into the general health system and other developmental activities. From a hospital perspective, the management process should manage the internal and external ecosystems as well as all the interfaces to the hospital. It should also put in place systems for ensuring an adequate patient flow, high productivity, quality, sustainability, and accountability. Since in many countries the notion of management in health care or more specifically in eye care is at an early stage or nonexistent, a proactive effort is required to build the management capacity quickly through a structured process.