Building capacity for government ophthalmic officers in B'luru

A three-day workshop for government vision care providers opened in Bengaluru on Friday with an aim to enhance their technical knowledge and skills.

A joint collaboration between India Vision Institute (IVI) and 2.5 New Vision Generation (NVG), the workshop, which has 60 state government ophthalmic officers participating, focuses on refraction, dispensing, soft skills and entrepreneurship development.

IVI CEO Vinod Daniel said, "Training and capacity building programs are an important plank of IVI's strategy to maximise vision screening outreach and raise standards of Indian Optometry."

"IVI works in partnership with stakeholders in a range of activities to raise awareness about avoidable blindness, reach out to underprivileged communities, organise and conduct training of optometrists, and provide access to spectacles to the needy," he noted.

"The Bengaluru workshop is the fourteenth in the series of training programs conceptualised and implemented by IVI following an agreement with NVG to hold capacity building workshops for ophthalmic officers with a focus on Tier II and III cities. The most recent workshop was conducted at Dharamshala in June this year," Daniel added.

Similar workshops have earlier been held at Rohtak, Trichy, Aurangabad, Patna, Ludhiana, Rajahmundry, Tumkur, Ranchi, Nanded, Raipur, Siliguri, and Jaipur.