Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jul 13, 2021
Date Accepted: Oct 2, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Effect of door-to-door screening and awareness generation activities in the catchment areas of vision centres on service utilization: A study protocol
ABSTRACT
Background:
Vision Centre (VC) is a significant eyecare service model to strengthen primary eye care services. VCs have been set-up at block level covering a population of 150,000-250,000 in rural areas in North India. Inadequate utilization by rural communities is a major challenge to sustainability of these VCs. This not only reduces the community’s vision improvement potential but also impacts self-sustainability and limits expansion of services in rural areas. Current literature reports lack of awareness regarding eye diseases and the need for care, social stigmas, low priority being given to eye problems, prevailing gender discrimination, cost, and dependence on caregivers as factors preventing utilization of primary eyecare.
Objective:
To address this, our organization is planning an awareness cum engagement intervention – door-to-door basic eye check-up and visual acuity screening in VC’s coverage areas, to connect with the community and improve rational utilization of the VCs.
Methods:
The study is a randomized parallel group experimental study, in which we will select 2 VCs each for intervention arm and control arm, among poor low performing VCs i.e., walk-in of ≤10 patients/day, from our two operational regions (Vrindavan, Mathura District and Mohammadi, Kheri District) of Uttar Pradesh. Intervention will include door to door screening and awareness generation in 8-12 villages surrounding VC, and control VC will follow existing practices of awareness generation through community activities and health talks. Data collected from each VCs for four months of intervention, primary outcome being utilization of VCs would include, number of walk-in patients, spectacle advised and uptake, referral and uptake for cataract and specialty surgery and operational expenses. Secondary outcomes would be uptake of refraction correction and referrals for cataract and other eye conditions. Differences in the number of walk-in patients, referrals, uptake of services and cost involved would be analyzed.
Results:
Participant recruitment in progress.
Conclusions:
Through this study, we would analyze if of our door-to-door intervention is effective in increasing the number of visits at VC and the thus, the overall sustainability. We would also study the cost-effectiveness of this intervention to recommend it’s scalability. Clinical Trial: This protocol has been retrospectively registered as a clinical trial (NCT04800718) on 15th March 2021 at the ClinicalTrials.gov registry. Participant recruitment is still in progress. https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04800718?term=NCT04800718&recrs=ab&draw=2&rank=1
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.