NCBI is mid-way through implementing our strategic plan (2007-2012). This annual report recalls for the reader the six goals formulated in our principle work areas to drive the strategy and summarises the organisation’s work in these key areas during 2009. The financial section of the report shows that co-funding – increased fundraised income, compensating for diminishing statutory income – is now a reality for NCBI going forward.
Changing Demographics
What is also obvious to us, is the changing demographics of our service users. Of the 1,729 people who came to avail of our services for the first time in 2009, 14% were over the age of 65 years, and 54% were over the age of 75 years. 7,812 individuals used all aspects of our community resource work and IT training services in 2009, more than half of the 14,659 people now on our database of service users.
Our investment in new centres across the country, consistent with our strategic plan, has given us the capacity to respond with the forms of emotional and practical supports consistent with increasing numbers and the nature of help required by an older population of service users. NCBI made a submission to the
National Positive Ageing Strategy consultation process, highlighting the potential for older people to be denied access to compensatory services around sight loss because of the way funding for physical and sensory services and services for older people is currently structured.
Collaboration
The Vision Impaired Service Providers Alliance (VISPA), comprised of NCBI, Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind, Fighting Blindness and St. Joseph’s Centre for the Visually impaired, continued in 2009 to make representations to the Minister for Health and Children for implementation of Ireland’s commitment to the WHO to set up a national vision strategy committee. The urgency for establishing a national strategy will continue to be made going into 2010. The existence of VISPA has allowed the member organisations to work more closely together in areas of eye health awareness and in promoting the use of services for people who are blind or vision impaired.
National Vision Strategy
That the Government has failed to set up a National Vision Strategy Committee is a disgrace, given that Ireland first committed to do so in May of 2003 and repeated that commitment in May 2009. The commitment was given by Ireland to the World Health Organisation (WHO) general assembly following the WHO 2020 vision strategy launched in 1999. VISION 2020, now signed up to by 120 nations, is a WHO global campaign designed to eliminate the main causes of avoidable blindness by the year 2020. The initiative aims to facilitate the planning, development and implementation of sustainable national eye care programmes, based on the three core strategies of disease control, human resource development, infrastructure and technology, incorporating the principles of primary health care.
A National Vision Strategy is required in Ireland to bring focus and coordination to an area of health care which has become the poor relation to other activities of medicine and rehabilitation. Scandalously growing waiting lists for cataract operations, inadequate screening for diabetic retinopathy and losing some key locations in eye care are symptoms of no coordination and lack of planned investment in eye health.
Research
Work was undertaken towards concluding a study funded by Irish Guide Dogs and NCBI into the mobility skills and needs of vision impaired people. The study was conducted by the occupational therapy department of Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) and its findings will be released in late summer 2010.
Likely to be conducted in 2010 will be a cost of sight loss study. Work on scoping research in this area was commenced in 2009 and international studies of similar types were identified as a basis for an Irish study which will prove that investment in eye care, treatment and rehabilitation has real, tangible and measurable cost benefits to the State. Planning for the future must be founded on research and continual re-evaluation of service needs, changing demographics and re-alignment of scarce resources.
Difficult times
The global recession and national uncertainties around managing within changing fiscal parameters, means that today’s manager must work through ambiguities and uncertainties way off the scale of previous experience. Living by the mantra of “doing more for less” is the new expectation of all voluntary sector agencies. It is, however, very difficult to apply principles of creativity and innovation when working with the Health Services Executive (HSE) where budget segmentations, silo working, parochial protectionism and a lack of visionary leadership conspire to maintain the status quo despite the rhetoric of obtaining greater value for money expended.
The tests of effectiveness and efficiency are less applied than the operation of economy – which is about doing the same level of work for less money. The application of the principles of effectiveness and efficiency should mean doing a whole lot more for less, with the result being achievement of greater economies in how an agency works. For effectiveness and efficiency to work, these principles need to be fostered and promoted in an incentivised environment where the savings of funding in one area of activity can be deployed to developing improvements in other under-resourced areas of need. Currently this is not the case but I work in optimism for it some day to be true.
Desmond Kenny
Chief Executive