The continued running of Vision Bus Aotearoa is secured, thanks to new funding

Vision Bus Aotearoa (VBA) has secured continued support for optometry student education and the delivery of eyecare to communities in need, thanks to renewed and bolstered funding from the Buchanan Charitable Foundation.

“With this generous support, we will be able to continue to offer mobile eyecare service delivery to underserved schools, primarily in the South Auckland region,” said Associate Professor Joanna Black, deputy head of the School of Optometry and Vision Science (SOVS), University of Auckland (UoA). “While there has been a slight gap in activities while we reappoint staff, we can now make plans to revisit the schools that participate in our programme.”

The Buchanan funding will cover three years of operational costs, including maintenance, one optometrist four days per week and one full-time dispensing optician (DO). “Having run the VBA over the past five years, we've refined our operations and this is the mix that will give us the best support,” said Dr Andrew Collins, head of SOVS. “We’ve learnt that having a DO dedicated to the service is essential and, in many ways, we've almost structured the bus around the DO because they are such an important component of its activity. Also, routinely the bus only goes out four days per week, particularly to schools. They prefer us not to arrive on Fridays, so that tends to be the day when maintenance or other technical support gets done.”

The funding has unlocked an opportunity for SOVS to expand the VBA beyond the schools it currently serves. The school is looking at other ways to use it, both for outreach work and student education, said Dr Collins. Currently, the team is scoping out deployment of the bus to support the university’s rural placement schemes.

“Run by the University of Auckland, the Rural Health Interprofessional Programme operates out of the Bay of Plenty (centred on Whakatāne) and in Northland (centred on Rawene at the base of the Hokianga Harbour). The idea is to bring the bus in for a period of the five-week rural health programme to provide support for the optometry training [which is six weeks in total]. Given that it's an interprofessional programme, bringing the bus would also provide a good opportunity for students in other health professions to see the services optometry can provide in the community,” he said.

Involving the bus in these programmes would serve the dual purposes of education and outreach, since both of those locations have been identified as having a reasonably high unmet need for eyecare, Dr Collins said.

On 30 June, the VBA will be the focus of UoA’s Giving Day. In the lead-up to the fundraiser, the university will be asking alumni and donors to support the vision bus. Follow VBA activities on LinkedIn: Vision Bus Aotearoa.

The VBA is also supported by Rotary, Helen Blake QSM and her daughter Barbara Blake (via the George Cox Community Spectacle Scheme) and Essilor New Zealand.