Campaigns

Open Your Eyes - Shopping Centre Tour

Summary: The 'Open Your Eyes' campaign goes on the road visting shopping centres around the UK.

Eye health advice centre - stand

Latest news

Following the success of the ‘Open Your Eyes’ tour in 2006 we will visit a further seven cities across the UK in 2007. The tour will start in April at the Brent Cross shopping centre in London and will also visit Norwich, Llandudno, Nottingham, Lancaster, Dundee and Plymouth.

The campaign

“Open Your Eyes” will be RNIB's major public eye health campaign for the next three years. It will highlight the need for a reduction in preventable sight loss, an increase in public awareness of eye health issues and appropriate prioritisation of visual impairment within policy and service provision by both national and local government.

Two million people in the UK are living with significant sight loss. Without decisive action by 2020 there will be four million people with sight loss in the UK - double today’s figure. This is due in part to the ageing population but also to an increase in underlying causes such as diabetes. Nine out of ten people fear losing their sight above any other sense, yet one in three still failed to have an eye test in the last two years.

Key campaign messages

Our key eye health campaign messages are to raise awareness of:

  • the need for regular eye tests to detect eye disease early, e.g. glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration
  • the message that smokers double their risk of sight loss through age-related macular degeneration
  • the fact that more than two million people in the UK are at risk of losing their sight through diabetes – the most common cause of sight loss in people of working age
  • the need for a healthy diet with lots of fruit and vegetables.

How a smoker would age over 20 years

The shopping centre tour

The “Open Your Eyes” shopping centre tour 2006 visited cities across the UK providing information and advice about eye health and the importance of regular eye tests in avoiding sight loss. The tour started in Bristol on 30 June 2006 and visited Cardiff, Birmingham, Leicester, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Southampton and Newcastle.

The stand features a booth where members of the public can have their photo taken. The individual is asked questions about their lifestyle and the results are used to age their image by 20 years. The image will be printed for free and given to them along with relevant eye health information.

Community meetings

To reinforce our message we also arranged community meetings with Age Concern to deliver key eye health messages to older people and others most at risk from avoidable blindness with talks covering issues around prevention and treatment of the major eye conditions.

Five ways to stay good looking - stand

Further information

For further information contact campaign@rnib.org.uk

Useful links

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Content author: campaign@rnib.org.uk

Last updated: 20/11/2008 11:13

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Quiz

Smokers are twice as likely to develop eye diseases such as cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, which can lead to blindness.




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