Letter from the APHA Vision Care Section Chair

Dear ICEHS Members,

Thanks for your interest in the Vision Care Section’s activities and for allowing us a forum to share ideas.  In addition, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support of Dr. Mel Shipp’s candidacy for APHA’s president-elect this past year!  The Vision Care Section is very excited about the future of APHA and we look forward to collaborating with ICEHS to achieve our mutual goals. 

 As you are aware, APHA’s overarching goal is to be the ‘go to’ organization for public health.  At the close of our annual meeting in November, I challenged our Vision Care Section  to ask ourselves why we should be the ‘go to’ organization for eye and vision health.  After all, there are any number of (much larger) organizations that focus on eyes and vision --what makes us so special?  Our mission statement seemed to be a good place to start… “to promote health and well-being with emphasis on vision and eye health through interdisciplinary partnerships. The Vision Care Section serves as an advocate to ensure equality in, and access to, vision and eye health care, and to ensure inclusion of vision in public health policy.”  Probably not unlike ICEHS and other sections, our mission emphasizes interdisciplinary partnerships, advocacy, and policy.

Our discussion quickly turned to the roughly 30 policies that we have written or co-sponsored over the past 30 years…  and the need to do a better job translating those policies into practice.  Our Advocacy Committee responded by developing a year-long Annual Advocacy Campaign, to begin during National Public Health Week.  On a quarterly basis, we will distribute a template press release to various entities on a variety of issues – this year, it relates to eye safety to tie into NPHW’s theme.  Our first press release focuses on sports eye protection, as we have an official APHA policy statement to support this effort.We’ll continue to develop this campaign throughout the year and intend to meet with leadership on Capitol Hill during the annual meeting in D.C., to advocate for both general public health issues, as well as those important to our section – this year we will emphasize safety and injury prevention. 

We are also eager to expand our efforts by way of interprofessional collaboration.  I hope ICEHS might be interested in collaborating at some level with our new advocacy campaign – perhaps Bella will join one of our leadership meetings to discuss the possibilities.  We can learn a lot from ICEHS and certainly appreciated your thoughtful comments (all of which were approved) on the updated draft of the fireworks resolution.  From emergency preparedness, fall prevention and the elderly, and sports injury, to hazard control (including physical, thermal, chemical, biological and ergonomic harm), our sections have plenty in common! 

I look forward to working with you as we all strive to make APHA the ‘go to’ organization for the nation’s public health.  Thanks again for your interest, and feel free to contact me with your ideas for future collaboration.

Warm Regards,

Renée Mika, OD, FAAO

APHA-VCS Chair

mikar@ferris.edu