Global World Sight Day Observance Helps to Put Eye Health and Eyecare into Focus
Prevent Blindness, the nation’s oldest eye health and safety nonprofit organization, is participating in World Sight Day, an annual day of awareness designed to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment, by promoting advocacy efforts that seek to make vision and eye health a priority.
On Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020, Prevent Blindness will launch a series of social media messages inviting the public to “Be A Visionary” and contact their government representatives to ask for their support of funding for programs that seek to put an end to preventable vision loss and blindness. Participants are encouraged to post about why they advocate for healthy eyesight with the hashtag #BeAVisionary. And, participants are also invited to share their vision story on our World Sight Day-Be A Visionary online message board at https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/g7Cn7eZR.
Prevent Blindness provides a free resource on its website that allows users to learn about current proposed legislation related to vision as well as provides a tool for users to find the direct contact information for their government representatives at www.PreventBlindess.org/advocacy. Prevent Blindness is also participating in the World Sight Day Congressional Briefing “Addressing #COVID-19 related health care challenges with stronger telehealth policy: The future of medicine,” presented by Vision 2020 USA. The briefing will be held virtually beginning at 11 a.m. ET.
Additionally, the Center for Vision and Population Health at Prevent Blindness (CVPH) is sharing the unique challenges of those with visual disabilities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many individuals living with vision loss, the pandemic has compounding the difficulties they already face, including access to routine healthcare, as well as activities of daily living. Individuals with vision loss face additional barriers to voting in the 2020 election as outlined in the CVPH Op-Ed. The group encourages all eligible voters to understand how they can safely participate in the upcoming November election and help ensure that sight-saving public health programs are funded at effective levels in the next Federal fiscal budget.
The goal of the CVPH is to raise awareness of vision and eye health as fundamental drivers of quality of life and to ensure all individuals are empowered to fully integrate vision and eye health into population health agendas. The CVPH works toward this goal by serving as a national technical assistance and policy resource for advancing vision and eye health from the population health perspective. The Center was conceived to carry out the critical role as a convener of national experts on vision health, research, patient perspectives, and public health while collaborating with community, state, and national stakeholders.
“As we all know, the upcoming election is critical to making sure that future public health funding, including for eyecare, is addressed,” said Jeff Todd, president and CEO of Prevent Blindness. “We strongly encourage everyone to learn about the platforms for all the candidates and make sure they vote by Nov. 3!”
For more information on Prevent Blindness and our advocacy initiatives, please visit http://www.advocacy.preventblindness.org/advocacy. To make a donation towards our sight-saving efforts, please visit https://advocacy.preventblindness.org/donate.
