CEHI Director receives Citizen’s Award
The Director of the Community Eye Health Institute, Mr Deon Minnies, was honoured by the Ophthalmic Society of South Africa (OSSA) for the role he played in preventing blindness in South Africa. Mr Minnies received the award, the Citizen's Award, during the Grand Dinner of the OSSA Congress which was held at Sun City.
Before becoming involved in blindness prevention programmes, he was centrally involved in the establishment of a field site for community-based epidemiological and immunological research in TB and HIV (SATVI) in the University's Institute for Infectious Diseases and Molecular Microbiology. He left UCT in 2005 to take up the position of Director of the Bureau for the Prevention of Blindness, where he was responsible for managing a national eye care programme. His ability to package community eye health initiatives for provincial health departments, non-governmental organisations and private institutions contributed to the improved performance of many blindness prevention programmes.
In 2008 he co-founded the Community Eye Health Institute (CEHI) in the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Cape Town. CEHI has the broad aim to improve the performance of prevention of blindness programmes in the Southern African region, through education and training, programme development support and research. While Mr Minnies is responsible for positioning CEHI as a resource for human capital development in sub-Saharan Africa, he also teaches on most of the short courses offered by CEHI, including the Postgraduate Diploma in Community Eye Health.