The Eyecare Project's 5 Point Approach

Dr. Roger Ohanesian's mission in Armenia, from the very beginning, was to eliminate preventable blindness.  The program started with a small group of doctors traveling to Armenia each year, and from these trips, Dr. Ohanesian realized that to scale the mission, it was critical to create a comprehensive and integrated program to educate and serve.  The AECP has created our programs around a Five Point Approach to provide a comprehensive plan to eliminate preventable blindness.  

Here's how the Five Point Approach Works:

1. Patient Care – As a friend of the Armenian Eyecare Project, you're probably most familiar with our medical missions to Armenia to provide help to at six eye clinics because we've achieved such dramatic results.  To extend our reach to patients, we added the Mobile Eye Hospital to our team.  It's a state of the art clinic on wheels!  Now, we're equipped to easily travel and serve.

2. Medical Education and Training – We consider education and training a cornerstone of our Five Point Approach.  We are committed to increasing knowledge in a variety of ways.  We host a clinical teaching program with U.S. physicians, and our Fellowship Program places nine Armenian doctors at U.S. institutions for specialty training.  We are active in the medical community through continuing education programs and teaching conferences globally.  We've instituted a training program for more than 1,000 primary care and regional ophthalmologists in partnership with USAID. We've also kept up-to-date teaching facilities through the AECP Education Center – with the Haig Babikian Ophthalmological Library and a Diagnostic Center and the Pfizer electronic teaching lab.

3. Public Education – We're taking the media by storm!  The AECP has distributed over half-a-million handouts on eye care and produced high-impact public service announcements.  Our website and social media updates are dedicated to educating people about what we do.

4. Research – We believe that knowledge is power. Despite the fact that blindness is a problem in Armenia, as a developing country, there is no reliable medical data available about Armenia. Our doctors collect information during eye screenings, and the data is currently being analyzed to create more effective patient and public education programs.

5. Capacity Building – Our major long-term goals is to help Armenia develop an effective eye care health system independent of volunteers.  We're helping this long-term vision become an immediate reality by building knowledge and resources through our training programs, state-of-the art facilities in Armenia, and more than $18 million of medical equipment and supplies donated by medical and pharmaceutical companies.

Through our five-point approach, we're on our way to eliminating preventable blindness in Armenia.  And you can be part of our success, too, by donating now.