Introduction
Deep Eye Care Foundation (DECF) is a non-government, community based eye health care organization which commenced its strenuous journey on 9th October, 2008 in Rangpur with a view to provide equitable and quality eye care services to all the people of Northern Part of Bangladesh. Since its inception, it has always been a matter of special emphasis to reach the unreached people and the poorest segment of the society where the impact of needless avoidable blindness is most damaging.
Within only twelve years, DECF is capable of delivering high quality eye care services at tertiary level to the large community of this region by achieving internal faith, outstanding development and established him as one of the recognized eye hospital in Bangladesh. Now a day’s DECF operates several sub-special departments like – Pediatric Ophthalmology, Retina, Orbit- Oculoplasty, Cornea for the first time in this region to ensure high quality eye care services including cataract through modern equipment and instruments and sub-special trained doctors. DECF provided satisfactory eye care services to more than 1.5 million people directly through their OPD and several programs. More than 85000 ocular surgeries were successfully performed for restoring visions, including more than 1000 pediatric cataract surgeries operated in this region. Thus, DECF has been playing a very important role in preventing avoidable blindness and increasing Cataract Surgical Rate (CSR) for this region. DECF also organized thousands of outreach programs for the poor community in the remote areas of this region to ensure them quality eye care and ocular surgeries. To create public awareness about eye health, DECF organizes several workshops, seminars with different stakeholders, including students and teachers every year.
DECF has been playing a very significant role to develop eye care professionals of all levels to shoulder the requisite responsibilities adequately through establishing it’s training and research institute named “Deep Institute of Community Ophthalmology (DICO)”. DICO operates several training modules for Ophthalmologist, Doctors, Mid-level Ophthalmic Personnel (MLOP), Outreach workers, Healthcare managers and Researchers to build their existing capacity and accelerate eye health care facilities as well.