Accepted for/Published in: Online Journal of Public Health Informatics
Date Submitted: Jul 17, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 17, 2023 - Sep 11, 2023
Date Accepted: Nov 23, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 23, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
The changing trends in human resources and infrastructure facilities in eye care in South India
ABSTRACT
Background:
Blindness and visual impairment is a major public health problem in India. The major causes of blindness and visual impairment in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana includes Cataract, refractive errors Retinal diseases, glaucoma and corneal opacities as per the Andhra Pradesh Eye Diseases study. To tackle the problem of blindness and visual impairment we need adequate number of human resources and sufficient infrastructure in eye care.
Objective:
The availability and distribution of eye care workforce are essential to reach the goals of Vision 2020: The Right to Sight, the global initiative for elimination of avoidable blindness. The present study assessed the trends in the availability, distribution of eye health professionals and eye care infrastructure in two Southern Indian States of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
Methods:
The questionnaires developed based on six building blocks of universal health care system. The questionnaires pre-tested in a pilot study conducted before the main survey. We used the questionnaires in both electronic form and hard copies to collect the data. Pre-tested questionnaires were administered to all eye care professionals and to eye care facilities having > 10 inpatient beds or performing > 100 cataract surgeries per annum. Data were collected for two different time periods, the base year 2002-03 and target year 2012-13. Data analysis done using SPSS 19.0 version.
Results:
The response rate was 81.1% for eye care facilities, 96.1% for ophthalmologists and 67.6% for mid-level ophthalmic personnel. The ophthalmologist population ratio increased from 1:88260 in 2002-03 to 1:51468 in 2012-13. The mid-level ophthalmic personnel population ratio increased to 1:168283 in 2002-03 to 1:138117 in 2012-13.
Conclusions:
Both Southern Indian States able to meet the requirement for ophthalmologists, eyecare infrastructure as per the goals of Vision 2020. But the number of mid-level ophthalmic personnel falls short of the ideal ratio for the population. There was maldistribution of eye care professionals as some districts have shortage of eye care work force.
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Copyright
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