Ophthalmology and Vision Science

International Eye Care and Eye Care Delivery

In total, there are 370 million Indigenous people living in 90 different countries. Native Americans had worse health than non-Native Americans, including higher incidences of preventable vision impairment. Service delivery strategies are used in nations like Australia and Canada to increase Indigenous peoples' access to eye care. To make it easier for Indigenous people in high-income nations to get eye care, we will perform a scoping review to find and summarise these service delivery options.

Methods and analysis

Searches on MedLINE, Embase, and Global Health will be done by an information professional. No language restrictions will be applied as we search all databases back to their creation. We'll conduct a search of the grey literature using the websites of pertinent governmental and service-providing organisations. To find further papers, field specialists will be contacted. Reference lists of pertinent articles will also be explored. All quantitative and qualitative study approaches that outline a strategy for providing eye care services to Indigenous populations will be considered. Titles, abstracts, and full-text publications will be independently reviewed by two reviewers, and data extraction will be completed. We will gather information on each service delivery model's context, inputs, outputs, Indigenous engagement, and supporting health system operations. We will extract information from where models were assessed. Using thematic analysis and descriptive statistics, we shall summarise the results.

Ethics and dissemination

We will only review published and publicly available data. Therefore, ethical approval is not necessary. The goal of this review is to help Mori in Aotearoa, New Zealand have better access to eye care services. In New Zealand and other high-income nations with Indigenous populations, the findings will be helpful to politicians, managers of health systems, and physicians who are in charge of providing eye care services. In addition to publishing our findings in a peer-reviewed publication, we will create an easily readable summary of the findings for posting on the website and presenting them at stakeholder meetings.