World Glaucoma Week
Each year, the World Glaucoma Week adopts a common theme, which is adapted to local conditions, and yet unifies our efforts. To be effective, community awareness projects need to be relevant for the general population. That means they need to be based locally and thus, rely on individuals in each location to be actively involved, adopting the unifying global message into the local culture.
Why is World Glaucoma Week important
The aim of the project is to help eliminate blindness caused by this disease by raising awareness and alerting on the need of having regular eye check-ups in which the optic nerve is examined.
How to observe World Glaucoma Week
- Involve your glaucoma patients as you organize a screening event in your local institute/hospital.
- Give a lecture to a patient support group.
- Participate in radio & TV shows to talk about glaucoma and to answer questions.
- Contact newspapers to publish information about glaucoma.
- Run a social media campaign.
To eliminate glaucoma blindness, there are several issues that need to be addressed. Glaucoma usually gives no warning until it is advanced, but the damage it causes to vision is ongoing and could become irreversible. Fortunately, for many patients treatment can halt the damage. That means the earlier the diagnosis, the more vision there is to save and the less likely the person is to become blind. Therefore, World Glaucoma Week aims at alerting members of the broader community to the need for regular simple eye checks, which allow earlier detection and, hence, saved sight.
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Resources
Reference Sites
- UN and other international NGO
- Non-Profits website for the observance
