BITS Pilani Has Collaborations With Top Healthcare Institutions in India Today

May 16, 2008 - PRLog -- Hope is like a road in a country where there was never a road but when many people start walking on it, the road comes into existence.

For millions of people around the world, receiving quality eye care is an enormous struggle. Lack of good educational programs in Optometry and poor practitioner-to-patient ratio adds to the woes of developing countries. With nearly 25 % of the global blindness data, India has just about 3,000 Optometrists which is highly inadequate.

For every 100,000 population in India, we have 1.50 Ophthalmologists to 0.60 Optometrists while Australia has 3.30 : 12.50, Canada has 3.30 : 10.26, New Zealand 2 : 10, UK 1.06 : 13.27 and USA 5.70 to 10.99. This shows where we stand in quality eye care. Blindness prevention needs Optometry and with the population of India hitting the billion mark, approximately 100,000 more Optometrists are needed to adequately care for those in need.

BITS Pilani in addition to a MS Medical Laboratory Technology programme, has been offering for the past over a decade BS and MPhil degree Programs in Optometry in collaboration with the Elite School of Optometry, a constituent institution of the Medical Research Foundation established by Sankara Nethralaya, the Chennai based premier eye care and research centre. For the past 8 years BITS, Pilani has also been offering the BS Optometry program in collaboration with Bausch & Lomb School of Optometry established by the L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad.

In the mid 60s, the Physician Assistant (PA) program was developed by Dr Eugene Stead, Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Duke University, North Carolina, USA to train health care professionals for rural areas which faced dwindling numbers of physicians and nurses. Physician Assistants are medically trained professionals who by working closely with their supervising physicians can provide comprehensive health care services and quality medical care and be important members of the health care delivery team of any nation.

BITS Pilani has also been offering the BS Physician Assistant programme in collaboration with Madras Medical Mission, Chennai and with Frontier Lifeline, Chennai. The objective of the PA program of BITS, Pilani is to prepare students to provide quality care for a diverse population in a changing health care environment through an education based in Modern Medicine with a focus on Holistic Thinking.

Details of above collaborative programs and the application forms are available in BITS Pilani website http://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/dlp-home The deadline for submitting the duly filled in application forms is June 30 , 2008.

About BITS Pilani: The Institute with motto ‘Knowledge is Power Supreme ‘which has set the industry university collaboration bench mark as well as having the reputation of pioneering the online examinations for admissions in India today through the path breaking BITSAT, offers degrees in various disciplines presently at Pilani, Dubai, Goa campuses and in the short future at Hyderabad campus apart from an array of work integrated learning programmes for HRD of a vast spectrum of Indian corporates. The alumni of the Institute are spread across the globe from Australia to America.

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Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani Rajasthan is a Deemed University (established under section 3 of the UGC Act. 1956 under notification no. F.12-23/63.U-2 dated 18th June, 1964) running educational programmes both on-campus as well as off-campus, offering degrees at all three-tiers, namely, Integrated First Degree, Higher Degree and Ph.D.

Website: www.bits-pilani.ac.in/dlp-home