Q&A: Matt Oerding on the Global Myopia Awareness Coalition

The Global Myopia Awareness Coalition (GMAC) was formed to promote the understanding of myopia and options for its management in 2019.

Following five successful US campaigns, the first UK awareness campaign was launched in August – encouraging families to limit their screentime over the Bank holiday weekend.

OT found out about the work of the coalition with GMAC marketing lead for the UK campaign, Matt Oerding.

What led to the formation of the GMAC?

The Global Myopia Awareness Coalition was formed in 2019. It came out of a conversation between approximately 40 industry leaders globally around some of the challenges in myopia management. One of the hurdles that kept coming up was lack of public awareness. If you talk to optometrists, they say that parents have never heard of myopia management. Individually, no company is able to move the needle in terms of awareness but if we worked together – not to talk about specific products, but the paediatric myopia epidemic as a whole, then we could have an impact. The ultimate aim is to get parents to take in their child for an eye test and ask their optometrist about myopia management. It was one of those great things in eye care where competitors come together for the common good. We now have close to 20 companies and associations that form GMAC.

GMAC is an all-volunteer organisation. For everybody involved, this is our night job, but we are passionate about making a difference. This is personal for me because one of my daughters is in myopia treatment and my wife is a high myope. We have a generation of kids who we can help. If we wait, and it takes 20 years for this to become a standard of care, we have missed out on that generation.

What work has been done by the GMAC so far?

The aim is to promote public awareness of childhood myopia and treatment options. You might think that the natural focus for a campaign would be countries in South East Asia because the incidence of myopia is so high – up to 80% or 90% in children. However, Singapore has been running a government campaign around myopia for eight years now, while China had a government myopia campaign for the past two years. They have targets set to reduce myopia levels in children. We looked at where GMAC could fill the gap between what government and NGOs are doing and what industry is doing.

We started in the US initially but after a couple of years of progress we wanted to take the message to other countries. Our first campaign outside the US was promotion of the Screen Staycation Guide in the UK at the end of August. The campaign encouraged families to limit their screen time during the Bank holiday weekend. It was supported by optometrist, Dr Keyur Patel, GP Dr Stephanie Ooi, and parent influencer, Myleene Klass.

The ultimate aim is to get parents to take in their child for an eye test and ask their optometrist about myopia management

When we looked at the UK, it stood out as a place with qualified eye care professionals who can provide myopia management solutions. However, from the data we looked at, the public awareness of myopia was woeful.

We commissioned a survey of 1500 parents about their attitudes to their child’s eye health, their child’s screen and outdoor time. From that, we found that 36% of children were spending up to five hours a day on screens in the UK. Only 21% of parents were worried about the effect of screentime on their child’s eye health. We thought that the screen staycation idea made perfect sense in the UK. We know that lack of outdoor time and increased screentime can increase the risk of myopia onset.

Going into 2023, the intention is that we will continue to run campaigns both in the US and UK. Here in the US, we tend to run two or three large campaigns a year around times that we know parents are thinking about their child’s eye health or their child’s overall health. We are also evaluating other countries where GMAC could make a difference.

What do we know about the impact of the campaigns in the US?

We have run five campaigns in the US now. We had a campaign in 2020 called Game Over Myopia, which partnered with gamers on Twitch and other platforms. We were encouraging gamers to take a break from their screens and get their eyes checked.

With each campaign we have targets relating to the number of people who see and engage with the content. We did a survey of 5000 parents across the US about myopia and eye health during our first campaign in 2019. That gave us a baseline of how many parents are aware of myopia and how many are aware that there are treatments available. Last year we did a follow up survey and saw a significant increase in how many parents are aware of myopia. Although it cannot solely be linked to the GMAC campaigns, that was really encouraging to see that the message is getting through.