PROJECT

Control of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease that is a growing global epidemic. Its long term complications such as diabetic retinopathy have severe effects on individual patients, families, communities and nations. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common and most serious ocular complication of diabetes. As the prevalence of diabetes increases, the burden of DR is also expected to increase. This increase is expected to be disproportionately high in resource poor settings. Interventions to control DR need to be implemented at this time to enable countries to cope with the dual epidemic. What can be done to prevent blindness from DR?

Although cost-effective interventions are available for prevention, diagnosis and treatment, health workers are known to have a knowledge gap regarding how it can be controlled. This is a barrier to implementation of control measures. This project aims to address this gap, and this would be the first OER course on the subject. The target learners would be the human resource for health involved in diabetes care and eye care. The course would include the diverse aspects of prevention of blindness from diabetic retinopathy.

Project resources are available at:

The talk is a part of the Open Education Design – Course for Practitioners 2018 event filmed and produced by Videolectures.NET.

Author

Nyawira Mwangi

Dr Nyawira Mwangi is a research student at the Department of Clinical Research, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Kenya Medical Training College, Nairobi. Nyawira does research in Diabetic Retinopathy, Public Health and Health Systems.

Mentor

Sally Parsley

Sally Parsley works as the technical lead of the Open Education for Eye Health programme at the Disability and Eye Health Group which is delivering 7 Open Access online courses on key topics in public health eye care. Her focus is on the use of educational technology to support non-formal and formal online learning by health professionals, especially in low and middle income settings. I'm particularly interested in the use of Open to equitably address training gaps and support capacity building in professional health education.

Mentor

Deon Minnies

Deon Minnies is the Director of the Community Eye Health Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The Community Eye Health Institute (UCT-CEHI) provides education and support to eye care managers to improve eye health and eliminate avoidable blindness in sub Saharan Africa. Under his leadership, the UCT-CEHI promotes the application of the principles and techniques of Better Management Practices and strategic leadership to improve the performance of district, provincial and national prevention of blindness programmes.