Over the years, Dr Anuradha continued her journey from clinical services to becoming a prominent faculty member at ESO. In 2010, the school gave her the opportunity to manage the daunting task of school eye health. Although not a designated role, Dr Anuradha, as a faculty member, of ESO decided to take on the role. “I liked this work…going and seeing children, helping them to overcome their ocular conditions and from then onwards, I contributed to this (REACH) project also.”
The academician in her spoke to the wasteful usage of paper to document and consolidate the large information they were gathering during the school screenings prior to REACH. “Though there are large scale community interventions in our country, the learning and consolidation has not come as desired which is cause for worry. So, the measures we took to consolidate data on excel sheets initially helped collect evidence which we in turn can give back to the country to learn from it. Even now, I pursue collection of data and instruct my team to be cautious while handling it. I insist to my team that after every community outreach I want five things of which data is the topmost.”
Through REACH, the data collection became even smoother and it immensely helped Dr Anuradha and her team of optometrists.
She goes on to take pride in how far they have come from then to now, “In the past decade, I have seen many other hospitals take up school screening with the need to replicate our model. We began testing for binocular vision anomalies and color vision deficiency some five years back, 2016, to be precise, which is also when we started our REACH project.”