Eye Care Education Academy facilitates skill upgradation

Dr Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital (SCEH) in partnership with Standard Chartered Bank has launched Standard Chartered-Shroff’s Eye Care Education Academy in New Delhi. The academy will help in imparting eye care education to healthcare practitioners (who engage with the eye, including eye care professionals, nurses, technicians, and students), with a focus on tier II and III cities. It will facilitate skill upgradation to more than 25000 eye healthcare workers in four years including ophthalmologists, optometrists, allied eye healthcare workers, and eye care managers. The academy aims to revamp eye care education and training and create new training offerings, develop a resource centre for capacity building to train all levels of eye care professionals, and strengthen continuing medical and non-medical education with the help of the existing team of ophthalmic educators. India has approximately 9000 optometrists who have undergone a four-year training course. However, to provide comprehensive vision care across the country, nearly 115,000 four-year trained optometrists are required. The ratio of ophthalmologists to population in urban India is 1:25,000, and in the rural areas, the ratio is close to 1: 219,000.