Three-year, $90,00 grant recently awarded to EEC outreach program
The Emory Eye Center's Global Ophthalmology program (GO-E) has recently received an important boost in its efforts to expand access to both vision health and to ophthalmological training in Ethiopia.
A three-year, $90,000 grant, from Vision2020 LINK USA, will allow GO-E to continue training ophthalmology residents from Ethiopia's Addis Ababa University (AAU) while also bolstering much-needed screenings for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) and diabetic retinopathy (DR).
“The idea is to improve our outreach to underserved populations in Ethiopia while, at the same time, increasing the subspecialty expertise of the locally-trained ophthalmologists,
explained GO-E's co-director, Jacquelyn O'Banion, MD.
Now that the COVID-19 pandemic is beginning to retreat, we are looking forward to a more robust exchange of physicians between our two countries.
Established first in the U.K., the Vision2020 LINKs program connects universities in low-income countries with those in high-income countries to support the development of high quality care. Within the AAU-Emory LINKs partnership, GO-E will focus on developing national diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity programs. The first step towards this goal will be the completion of a needs assessment. This will allow organizers to fully understand where the deficits exist, and what measures are needed to develop robust programs in the future - new technology and equipment, community advocacy, or training of subspecialists.
The Vision2020 LINK USA partnership is one of several that fulfills the mission of GO-E, O'Banion pointed out.
Across the world, there are so many instances where treatable eye conditions deteriorate into blindness - sometimes because there simply isn't an ophthalmologist with the proper training to deliver it,
she said. When GO-E is able to train our colleagues from low-resourced countries like Ethiopia, we can stave off this trend, now, and in the future.
-Kathleen E. Moore