Advocacy to improve the delivery of eye care.

Advocacy has a role to play in any eye care initiative. It can help individuals or organisations to obtain more resources, and it can support programme implementation and service delivery. This article focuses on using advocacy as a tool for improving the delivery of eye care services – both in terms of reaching more people, and in terms of improving the quality of services available for specific eye conditions. When planning an advocacy strategy aimed at improving eye care delivery, it is important to identify those groups who are in a position to make a difference. These are the targets for advocacy – the people at whom you need to direct your efforts. They can make important decisions that directly affect service delivery or simply influence others in a way that will improve the situation. If these key target groups can see the benefits of what is being advocated, it will be easier to both get their support and ensure that this support is sustained. For example, education officials would like a reduction in school drop-outs; diabetolo-gists would like better compliance to follow-up, and so on. Hence, it is important that the design of an intervention or programme should offer benefits to all – it should be a 'win-win' solution. Those who are advocating for better delivery of eye health services (whether they are eye health providers, hospital managers, or VISION 2020 national coordinators) should therefore clearly communicate these benefits – supported by the relevant evidence – to the groups that are the targets for their advocacy. The following groups are key targets for advocacy: Policy makers (government) Policy makers at all levels of government should be targeted by those advocating for better eye care delivery. Policy makers are in a position to create and implement regulations. They can also offer incentives and monitor compliance. Let us take the example of refractive error. Amongst the section of the population undergoing formal education or already in employment, one of the major eye care interventions required is refractive error services. In this case, a key group of policy makers to target could be those in education and industry (or labour), as they are in a position to improve access to refractive error eye care for these two population groups. For example, they can encourage eye examinations of students by instituting school screening programmes; they can also encourage eye examinations among the workforce …