INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS MUST HAVE ACCESS TO FREE EYE HEATH CARE

When the late Professor Frederick Hollows, OM, decided to establish the Fred Hollows Foundation, he was sitting at his dining room table with a group of friends and supporters who believed in him and the work he was doing. His dream was to end avoidable blindness.



You can make a difference
 

In his book Fred Hollows : an autobiography, Fred said “I studied medicine so I could help others", and "five months before he passed away, with the aim of continuing and expanding on the program work he had started in Eritrea, Vietnam and Indigenous Australia”, The Fred Hollows Foundation was established in Sydney in 1992. 

Fred was an Ophthalmologist and a passionate social justice activist. After working in outback Australia he commented “It was like something out of the medical history books," he said, "eye diseases of a kind and degree that hadn't been seen in western society for generations. The neglect this implied, the suffering and wasted quality of human life were appalling.” As a result, Fred made a commitment to reducing the cost of eye healthcare for both Indigenous Australians and those in developing countries. Fred determined a long time ago that it is the Indigenous who are affected by chronic eye disease more than any other populated culture in Australia.

The Hollows Foundation is committed to implementing programs that work towards creating a better life for indigenous Australians who “have lower incomes, higher rates of chronic disease, are more likely to live in overcrowded housing and are less likely to continue their education”. Working on an understanding of the relationship between poverty and visual impairment, the Foundation says there are an “estimated 39 million people around the world today who are blind. Four out of five don't have to be”.

Finding the issues that contribute to poor eye health and help to establish “equity between people” is an important part of the work and, with investment and commitment a project called “Close the Gap”; was established in April 2007 by “a coalition of more than 40 of Australia’s leading health, human rights and Aboriginal organisations”. Their vision is to “achieve health equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders by 2030”.

Using eight well established development goals as the guiding principles for the continuation of the Foundations work, they incite that simple intervention and inexpensive medications all contribute to the greater good of this cause. However at the top of the development goals was the need to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Something no person should ever have to endure in a country as rich as Australia.

The Foundation says; “Our goal is system reform and good health policy and practice at all levels – local, national and regional – to achieve genuinely accessible health and eye health services for all Indigenous Australians”.
 

To achieve the vision of the late Professor Hollows, the most ethical way to manage this problem is empowerment in communities and the strengthening of people’s own culture so they may be afforded a sense of self-worth and, a collaborated determination that sees Indigenous Australians being given access to first class health care, today, tomorrow and every day after that.