Reaching into the district: strengthening the eye care team.

VISION 2020: The Right to Sight has provided a vision and a common goal for eye care programmes. It has provided the paradigm shift, or change in the way of thinking, from individual patient care to population care, a shift from each person doing a job or task, to a group working to eliminate avoidable blindness. Such a common goal needs a team approach. The VISION 2020 approach proposes that activities should be planned and implemented for a defined population and geographical coverage and promotes the concept of a manageable unit of a population of 500,000 to one million, termed a VISION 2020 delivery unit. Recommendations on targets for services and resources required have been made as unit ratios of the delivery unit, for example two to four ophthalmologists, four to ten ophthalmic nurses per delivery unit. This implies that there is a team responsible for the eye health of the population of a VISION 2020 delivery unit.