Inclusive eye health in Bhopal: assessing characteristics of patients and measuring equity of access to eye health services

• To make the Madhya Pradesh urban eye health programme (MPUEHP) more inclusive, by reducing barriers to healthcare and reaching more people with disabilities and women with eye care services
• To develop and test a series of tools and approaches that could eventually be further tested and replicated across Sightsavers’ eye health portfolio in Asia and Africa

Sightsavers India has been delivering the Madhya Pradesh urban eye health programme (MPUEHP) since 2014. The programme runs in Indore and Bhopal and works with hospital and community-based partners. It aims to increase the access of disadvantaged populations – slum dwellers in particular – to eye care services through the establishment/development of vision centres located within slum communities and targeted outreach camps to identify and treat or refer patients for eye health problems.

In Bhopal, the MPUEHP works with a hospital partner – Sewa Sedan hospital – and a community based non-governmental partner AARAMBH (Advocacy for Alternative Resources, Action, Mobilisation and Brotherhood) to deliver the programme. In 2014, Bhopal was chosen as the site of a pilot project to test the collection of disability data from eye health settings, which ran until the end of 2015. Immediately afterwards, an inclusive eye health pilot approach was incorporated into the MPUEHP in Bhopal and disability data continued to be collected. The project aimed to increase the number of people with disabilities and women accessing eye health services from the programme over its 18 months lifespan.

The report (see above) describes the data collected during the two project periods and identifies some key trends that have emerged from the data. The report seeks to identify whether patients attending services during the inclusive eye health period had different characteristics than those attending during the earlier (pre-intervention) disability data collection period.

• Read the summary report