Saturday 11th August (Part 4)

Back at the office our attention turned to social inclusion and advocacy work. Our community based rehabilitation (CBR) in Bangladesh is as much an outreach, case finding project for cataracts as it is a CBR project. Over the last four years it has identified nearly 50,000 cataract patients compared to 7,000 persons needing rehabilitation services. CBR workers are also used to ensure follow up – a great example of real comprehensive eye-care services (CES) in action. (Sightsavers promotes a model of comprehensive eye-care services, whereby a community is served with ALL aspects of eye-care in their entirety)

I asked whether the restriction on only being able to support visual impairment rather than other disabilities proved to be a problem, but this did not seem to be the case. At the moment we had a cross referral system with other INGOs for other disabilities, although it was acknowledged that this wasn’t working as well as it might. We did not have any evidence concerning the proportion of blind people who had other disabilities, but CDD expressed the view that children with multiple disabilities would generally not survive infancy.

The office was keen to do more on education, which they regarded as the priority should more funds become available.