NIHR158706 - Preventing childhood blindness through integration of eye health into child health policies and systems
Including eye care in the recommended global WHO/UNICEF primary level child health programme, the Integrated Management of Newborn & Childhood Illnesses (IMNCI), so that primary health care workers are trained in how to screen, refer and treat eye diseases in childrenBackgroundIn 1995 WHO and UNICEF jointly launched the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) which has become the blueprint for care of young children in over 100 countries. Care of the newborn has since been added (IMNCI). This includes all major conditions of child health but does not include eye health. This means that PHWs lack the basic knowledge and skills in screening and treating childhood eye problems. Our group, the International Centre for Eye Health (ICEH), has been working on implementing and evaluating how eye care can be included in child health programmes in LMICs to address this gap. We have worked with the MoH in Tanzania to include a training module on eye care in the IMNCI curriculum or PHWs. Subsequently more than 3,000 PHWs have been trained by the MoH and eye health has been included in the national IMNCI policy routinely. We aim to build on this success of this work to scale up this model in two further countries and use the findings to advocate for global policy change. Activities: We now plan to: a) Develop and implement our eye care IMNCI programme in Nepal b) Evaluate and further strengthen the programme in TanzaniaWe will take a health systems
approach throughout considering all six of the WHO health systems building blocks. We have a collaborative approach which involves co-creating with key national and global stakeholders and will start by building the international and national steering groups in each country with UNICEF, WHO, MoH, NGOs, healthcare experts, professional groups and patient representatives.
Health Nepal