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World Glaucoma Week 2016
World Glaucoma Week Committee members about what World Glaucoma Week means to them personally and why is it so important.
The Sixth World Glaucoma Week—celebrated from March 6 to 12, 2016—demonstrated an enthusiastic rally of thousands of volunteers for the awareness and prevention of avoidable vision loss and the suffering caused by this ‘sneaky thief of sight’.
In addition to the 431 events registered in www.worldglaucomaweek.org, many other events, videos, photos and posts have been uploaded throughout the social networks. More than 3,000 likes on Facebook demonstrate the value of these awareness campaigns. Social networks move at their own rhythm crossing cultural and linguistic barriers without problems. However, if we hope to send clear and legitimate information to the community, it is crucial that the WGA and WGPA create educational materials about glaucoma using the current content discussed by experts and distribute it using the most contemporary strategies of communication. Another issue is that ‘World’ Glaucoma week needs to reach everyone. At this point in time, most of the communication by WGA is in English, which is the third most spoken language around the globe after Mandarin and Spanish.
The slogan and logo ‘Beat Invisible Glaucoma’ shows the commitment of ophthalmologists, patients and the community around the world in reducing the burden of this disease. Our imagination is infinite and other logos will be adopted according to cultural or linguistic needs.
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in previous years, WGW participants learned from past experiences to come up with
new and creative initiatives. One of the most remarkable activities was
Light Up in Green for Glaucoma in Japan, where the most famous buildings
were illuminated in green during World Glaucoma Week and, in Europe, the Vision
Van provided free eye exams and was followed by many people on Twitter. In Latin
America, Glaucoma Colombia, a non-profit organization, held more than 50 events
all over the country, including a distribution of flyers at a soccer game.
Glaucoma damage never stops and neither will we! As we look forward to World Glaucoma Week 2017, it is time to start thinking about how we can contribute and help to raising further glaucoma awareness in the best interests of our patients. We should take into account our three main objectives:
- increase the presence of WGW on social networks;
- create valid up-to-date material for sharing around the world;
- concentrate our effort on people who have an increased risk of suffering glaucoma and are unprivileged for eye care.
