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The Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss has called for greater initiative from the private sector in health care. Addressing the inaugural session of the Symposium on public private participation in Eye Care on World Sight Day yesterday, the Minister said his only plan was to give vision for all in the country. He congratulated the initiative of the Government of India and Vision 2020 India, a confederation of international and national NGOs for organizing a Symposium on this issue. The Minister exhorted ophthalmic experts and doctors present in the Symposium to give greater focus to research in stem cell. He said in the future stem cell research is going to play an important role. He urged the experts present to give support to this research.
Complementing the NGOs and the private sector for providing affordable eye care services to the poor affected population, he said the partnership should be further strengthened to ensure that nobody remains needlessly blind. He said that this was a challenging task which could be achieved only through the active involvement of the community. He called for involvement of the community including Panchayats as without them it may be difficult to reach remote rural areas. He said the National Programme for Control of Blindness was decentralized by constituting state and district blindness control societies throughout the country.
The National Blindness Control Programme was started in 1976 with the aim of reducing blindness to 0.3% in the country from a level of 1.4%. At present, the Programme has reduced blindness to 1.1% and it is hoped to reduce it further to 0.8% by the end of the Tenth Plan. Among the project strategies is creating eye care infrastructure, free services to the poor, accessibility for modern technologies for Cataract and Intraocular lens transplant. The blindness control programme is one of the disease control programme where there has been successful public-private partnership. The Phase II of the National Blindness Control Programme was recently cleared by the Cabinet and is to be implemented all over the country. The organizational structure for the National Programme for Control of Blindness includes structures at the central, state and district levels. Micro planning at the district level has also been envisaged.
The Symposium yesterday was attended by Dr. G.N. Rao, President, International Agency for Prevention of Blindness, Dr. S.P. Agarwal, Director General of Health Services and Smt. P. Jyoti Rao, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.
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