CooperVision’s Adopt a Patient® Program provides optometry students an opportunity for a “hands on” fitting experience that would otherwise have been prevented by a patient’s lack of financial resources.
Optometry students are encouraged to “adopt” a deserving patient from their community into the program, fit them with CooperVision soft contact lenses, and provide appropriate follow-up care during their clinical contact lens rotation. Every optometry student is allocated one complimentary annual supply of soft contact lenses from CooperVision that they can provide to a deserving low income patient in their community. Each school sets their own eligibility criterion for patients.
The primary beneficiaries of the program are typically younger patients who would greatly benefit from contact lens wear, but would otherwise be denied the opportunity because of their family’s income level. CooperVision provides selected patients in need a one-year supply of contact lenses upon completion of the fitting process at the school’s clinic or satellite clinics. “Adopt-A-Patient” is intended to be a positive contact lens fitting experience for optometry students during their clinical contact lens rotation while serving under-privileged patients and the program has been warmly received by students who participate.
Here are some of the tremendous responses to the Adopt-a-Patient® experience:
“Thank you for giving me the means to help this homeless patient get back in contact lenses for his occupation. The clariti dailies were a perfect match for him and the supply is so generous. These lenses will help improve his quality of life in many ways. The patient is very grateful and will now be able to be more comfortable when he is at work and doing his favorite hobby, karate. Fitting these lenses was extremely easy and the experience I gained will increase my knowledge and expertise in the field.”
-Kelsey Hanke, TOSU Class of 2018
“Thank you for supplying Expressions lenses to our patient who has one highly disfigured and non-seeing eye from her history of domestic abuse. It is obvious from seeing her that this lens, although not completely making the 2 eyes look the same, allows her to feel so much better about herself. She says when she wears it people don’t start conversation with “What’s wrong with your eye?” but instead have a conversation with her about “normal subjects.” Thank you for improving her quality of life and allowing me to do the challenging fit of the lenses on this highly scarred left eye.”
- Ellen Vandenberg, TOSU Class of 2018