More than Medicine: One Health Administration Student’s Journey Providing Community-Based Eye Care

One Health Administration student is leveraging his training as an optometrist to explore how policy gaps, access barriers, and community-led solutions shape health outcomes in underserved communities.

By: Marielle Boutin

When we talk about healthcare “impact,” it tends to be measured by what is most obvious. ER wait times, surgical backlogs, and staffing shortages often dominate the conversation around system-wide impact, while other essential forms of care remain hidden in plain sight.

Vision care, oftentimes siloed from mainstream health policy, plays a quiet but crucial role in shaping health outcomes.

One IHPME student argues that disparities broaden when eye care is treated as an outlier, but when it is made accessible, the potential impact extends far beyond renewed eyesight.

Dr. Christian (Ntsiful) Anderson is a student in IHPME’s Health Administration (MHSc) program. He is also an optometrist, Mastercard Scholar, and public health advocate dedicated to improving health outcomes locally and globally.

In November 2025, he accompanied three other optometrists on a trip to the Dominican Republic aimed at providing vision care to an underserved community. The trip was coordinated by Rayjon Share Care, an organization based out of Sarnia, Ontario, dedicated to social justice and sustainability initiatives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Founded on strong partnerships, their causes span women’s empowerment, locally-informed health programs, educational development, and their Eyeglass Program. The group’s mission resonated with Dr. Anderson, inspiring him to jump at the opportunity to join the trip, where he and his fellow volunteers spent a week taking part in an eye care outreach program that provided free eye exams and glasses in Batey communities.

Dr. Anderson’s reason for taking part in this impactful work extended further than his career as an optometrist. Opening avenues of care to marginalized and under-resourced communities felt personal to him. Much of his background as an optometrist was rooted in providing eye care for rural communities across Ghana. More recently, he has dedicated much of his studies in the Health Administration program on designing sustainable eye care models to reduce access gaps across Ghana and Africa.

“My personal and professional experience in Ghana have deeply shaped how I approach healthcare interventions,” says Dr. Anderson. “Growing up in a rural community with limited access to health services have given me firsthand insight into the challenges people face […] These experiences taught me how to co-create solutions with communities, ensuring maximum participation in interventions and establishing channels for follow-up care to sustain benefits for patients.”

While he expected to witness how financial constraints can impact how people prioritize care, which he was all too familiar with from his work in Ghana, what was more disconcerting was the overall absence of access to care.

Bateys are communities that were primarily established around sugar mills, providing purpose-built labour housing to undocumented immigrants from Haiti who worked in the surrounding sugar cane fields. As a result, the generations since the original settlement have systematically been denied citizenship, leaving them living without access to formal education and healthcare.

As he treated patients, Dr. Anderson was struck by the impact of this apparent generational poverty, leaving him with newfound insight into how gaps in care access can push people deeper into the recesses of marginalization.

The experience was a tangible reflection of what he has learned in the Health Administration program, that policy, or lack thereof, can profoundly influence health-seeking behaviour.

By the end of the week-long trip, Dr. Anderson and the team of volunteers had met and treated roughly 500 community members, assessing eye health, diagnosing visual impairments, treating minor issues, and ensuring each patient left with glasses, or sunglasses, if they needed them.

One patient, he says, stood out among the rest. An elderly woman, guided by her grandson, was diagnosed with a high myopic astigmatism, a condition categorized by severe nearsightedness and blurry vision caused by irregular eye shape. She arrived unable to see clearly or walk on her own and, with the help of volunteers and a new pair of glasses, she could finally see with ease and walk independently for the first time in years.

“The joy on her face and the way she left the site smiling, confident, and self-reliant reminded our team why we do this work. It was a simple pair of glasses, yet it dramatically improved her quality of life and highlighted the profound impact of accessible eye care.”

Instilled with a renewed sense of dedication to addressing socio-economic disparities among communities like the Bateys, Dr. Anderson left the Dominican Republic ready to continue advocating for improved resource allocation among underserved groups, particularly in Ghana, where he is working to launch a similar volunteer and outreach program.

His new project will involve a series of screening trips in underserved areas, offering free glasses, and, where possible, medication to treat minor conditions. The initiative will be spearheaded by 20/20 Mission, and supported by Rayjon ShareCare, the Ghana Optometric Association and the Department of Optometry and Visual Science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST.) Once completed, Dr. Anderson hopes to apply his findings and expand the initiative to other African countries, ensuring everyone has access to care regardless of socio-economic status.

Efforts such as these, he says, are not simply about medicine, they are about empowering people.

“Throughout my career in community eye care, I’ve witnessed countless preventable conditions severely affecting livelihoods. Elevating eye care, both at the community level and within broader health systems, provides an equal opportunity to address these inequalities and transform lives in meaningful, tangible ways.”

Looking ahead, Dr. Anderson hopes to continue elevating eye care to not only treat disease, but to dismantle barriers, restore dignity, and above all, help those who have been left behind.