Interview Highlight: Brandon Ah Tong and Jonathan Craig - IAPB

Sam catches up with Jonathan Craig from Vision 2020 and Brandon Ah Tong from Fred Hollows Foundation, who have both recently returned from the International Association for the Prevention of Blindness' conference in Nepal.

Among other things Brandon speaks about his new role as the chair of the IAPB's West Pacific region, and Jonathan speaks about his first IAPB conference, as they put things in place for a Global Eye Health Summit in 2026 or 2027.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:05):
With this year's 2030 Insight Life conference recently concluding in Kathmandu,
I had the great pleasure of speaking with two of
the attendees, Jonathan Craig and Brandon Ah Tong. Now, Jonathan
Craig is a voice you may have heard a couple
of times on Talking Vision. He's the policy and advocacy

(00:26):
manager at vision 2020 Australia. But this is my first
time chatting with Brandon for very, very long time listeners.
You may have heard him back in the day chatting
with Stephen Jolly, but these days he is the equivalent
of sorts to Jonathan working at Fred Hollows. There's also

(00:48):
been quite a few developments of late, which I was
very excited to chat to Brandon and Jonathan about, such
as the conferences build up to a planned global health summit,
and that's ongoing. But we also saw Brandon sworn in
as the Western Pacific Chair of Iapb. So without further ado,

(01:13):
please enjoy my conversation with Jonathan Craig and Brandon Tong
on this week's episode of Talking Vision. Jonathan Brandon, welcome
to Talking Vision. Thank you very much for your time.

S2 (01:27):
Thank you for having us.

S3 (01:28):
Great to be here, Sam.

S1 (01:29):
Now, Jonathan, we've spoken a couple of times before, but Brandon,
you're quite new to talking vision. Let's just give you
an opportunity to introduce yourself, and Jonathan will come to
you afterwards for new listeners.

S3 (01:45):
Sure. Happy to do so. Sam and I actually have
been here a number of times in the past. So
my name's Brandon Tong. My day job is the director
of Global Policy and Advocacy with the Fred Hollows Foundation.
But I do wear several hats, one of which is
the regional chair for the Western Pacific, for the International
Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, which is effectively the

(02:08):
global peak body for the eye health sector. I'm also
a board member of vision 2020 Australia, former employee of
Vision Australia. Current member of Vision Australia and client and
also member of Blind Citizens Australia. So many hats.

S2 (02:25):
So many hats.

S1 (02:26):
Certainly. And speaking of hats, you've got quite a few yourself, Jonathan.
Perhaps not as many as Brandon, but still quite impressive
in their own right.

S2 (02:36):
Yeah, I'm working on my hat collection. So, uh, I
am currently policy and advocacy manager for vision 2020 Australia
and former editor also of Blind Citizens News magazine from BCA.

S1 (02:50):
And as I understand it, Jonathan, you've been jet setting
around the world recently. You've headed off to Kathmandu in
Nepal for the 2030 Insight Live conference. So tell us
a bit about that one and how that all went.

S2 (03:06):
So this was my first Insight Live conference. Do you
know how many you've been to, Brandon?

S3 (03:12):
Oh, must be my 11th.

S2 (03:14):
Yeah. So the two of us were coming to it
from different angles. But Brandon was a big part of
convincing me that I should and could go. And also, um,
my CEO, Carly Iles, played a big part. And I
think for me to go to a conference where 59
countries were represented. That in itself was just extraordinary. And

(03:39):
to really think about the fact that all over the world,
people are dealing with the same kind of issues and
coming toward the same kind of solutions as we are
here in Australia is also very helpful in that it
makes us all feel less alone. And yet there are

(04:02):
also really unique contextual problems everywhere that we go and
contextual solutions as well. Um, Nepal is a very interesting
country because they're really very, very committed to eHealth and
to creating better treatment pathways for preventable blindness. But they
have so many problems there with remoteness and trying to

(04:23):
get services out to people and trying to educate people
about what services are available. So I like to say
that I was very wide eared. I was just so
eager to absorb and learn about everything.

S1 (04:36):
Brandon, I'm very interested to come to you now and
get your thoughts on the most recent conference, but also
as a veteran Insight Live conference attendee. I'm very interested
to just get some details for people out there who
may not be familiar with the conference and the sort
of topics they cover.

S3 (04:57):
Sure. Happy to do that. Maybe I might find, you know,
a decade or so to my first conference and come
at it from that angle. So my career in policy
and advocacy started here at Vision Australia actually. And the
last role I had was the manager of the Public
Affairs department. And then I moved to vision 2020 Australia actually,

(05:22):
where into a predecessor role of Jonathan's in actual fact.
And so it was there that I attended my first
Iapb or International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness conference.
At that time, they were called Council of Members meetings,
and they were very much so simply there for members

(05:42):
of Iapb to come together to look at issues affecting
members in the areas, regions, countries that they're working in
and to work towards what was then the broader movement
of vision 2020, Right to Sight and the Who's Global
Action Plan on Universal eHealth. If we skip forward to

(06:05):
To 2020. 2020 was both a year and the culmination
of that vision 2020 movement. So there was a question
mark around, so what are we doing post 2020? And
in the development of the new global strategy, what emerged
was a strategy called 2030 in sight. And that strategy

(06:28):
really tries to lean into three things. One, it's about
elevating eHealth as a political issue in the broader Sustainable
Development Goals world or SDGs. Number two, to integrate eHealth
within health and beyond health. And number three, to really
drive activation of eHealth, um, with different sectors such as

(06:52):
the private sector and public private partnerships and those sorts
of things. So 2030 Insight Live is a conference that's
aimed at progressing that strategy. And unlike the conference of
a decade ago. This conference is really about trying to
bring a broader group of members and supporters together towards

(07:14):
this broader movement. And again, 2030 is both part of
the title of the strategy. But of course, it's also
about the year 2030 that culminates in the end of
the current SDG or Sustainable Development Goals era. So that's
really the background of where 2030 Insight Live has come from.

(07:35):
And I've seen a real shift and evolution of the conversations,
the types of areas of interest that people coming to
the conference are looking to lean into, learn from, and
deepen their understanding around. And one of them is around
the question of, are we here simply to address avoidable blindness?

(07:57):
And I wouldn't mind coming back to that question in
a second, but also the current W.H.O. strategy, which is
called Integrated people centred eyecare, which comes under a broader
framework around advancing and trying to achieve universal health coverage,
which basically means that everybody, everywhere should have equal access

(08:20):
to quality and affordable health services and in our case,
eHealth and eyecare services. And that spectrum goes beyond avoidable blindness,
but also includes vision rehabilitation, access to assistive technologies, and
ensuring that people who are blind or vision impaired are

(08:41):
fully included and participate in their communities.

S2 (08:45):
Mm. Okay. And vision rehabilitation is. And all of that
is is. Yeah. The work that Vision Australia does here
but you know is done by various organisations in the
rest of the world.

S1 (08:56):
Jonathan, I'm really keen to, um, continue on with you
and give Brandon's voice a little bit of a break
because he's just given some absolutely fantastic Descriptions and insights there.
But Jonathan, I'll continue on with you, especially in regards
to the conferences and their work towards a planned global

(09:17):
eHealth summit, which has been eHealth has been mentioned in
there quite extensively by Brandon. But tell us a little
bit about that global summit and the plans around that one.

S2 (09:29):
Yes. Well, this was a really important topic of the conference, really.
The global eHealth summit, put very simply, is essentially a
real push to get many countries, hopefully 50 countries at least,
to make a real and genuine commitment to eHealth. And

(09:49):
another example that you might have heard about on Vision
Australia Radio is the Global Disability Summit that happened earlier
this year. But the global eHealth summit is something that
we're building up towards and strategizing towards. How can we
get our countries involved? And that's where vision 2020 comes
into play here, because one of our missions will be,
how can we get Australia to come to the summit?

(10:12):
Can we get Australia to make a commitment around eHealth
at the global eHealth summit, when it happens in 2026
or 2027? So I think that was the pulse of
the conference. And really, Brandon and I kind of have
an interesting like shared opinion or shared mission that we have,
if you don't mind me saying, you know, which is

(10:32):
I think that one of the things that IPB needs
to do more, which is not to be criticizing them,
but we really think is valuable, is to bring more
lived experience into the conversation. Now, lived experience doesn't necessarily
just mean people who are blind, but it also means
people who have been patients and who have benefited from

(10:54):
eHealth services, and or people who haven't benefited when they
needed eHealth services. For someone who needed a cataract surgery
but wasn't able to get one. And the point that
I think Brandon and I have been making is that
when organizations like vision 2020, in all of their different countries,
go to their governments and say, hey, you need to

(11:14):
come to the global eHealth summit. Really, the people who
are impacted by eHealth should be involved in those conversations
and part of the advocacy push. Do you think that's
a good starting point of what we're talking about, Brandon?

S3 (11:27):
Yeah, absolutely. And you've brought one of the things that
we really need to strengthen and work on within Iapb,
but within the broader eHealth sector itself. And I think
number one, starting with bringing those voices to conferences like this,
embedding those voices into existing subcommittees and committees, developing the
summit will be really important to actually bring that perspective

(11:51):
in and to expand out the breadth and the depth
of what we do at the summit and what we're
trying to engage governments, first and foremost, to actually commit to.
And it's been my mission in my own professional career
to try and bridge the divide between what I would
call sort of vision related disability and eHealth, where you've

(12:11):
got those prevention treatment elements. And because us as people,
we're not as simple as saying you're in that box
or this box. We are people who engage in healthcare.
We are people who engage with various types of services,
whether it be orthoptics or using assistive technology or orientation
and mobility. We come in and out of things all

(12:32):
the time, and we need to make sure that the
summit and what governments are signing up to actually reflect
that experience and the breadth and depth of what people
really need in their lives.

S1 (12:43):
Brendan, I'd love to stay with you and have a
little bit of a chat about some recent developments for
you in regards to being sworn in as the Western
Pacific Chair of Iapb. So I'm really keen to get
your feelings around that, and also what you're really looking

(13:05):
forward to getting stuck into. And I guess this is
also a good opportunity to come back to that question
you raised around preventable blindness.

S3 (13:15):
Sure. Let me start with I'll zoom out to global
and then I'll come into the Western Pacific region. So
if we look at what is the population of the
world that we're talking about here. So the numbers are
quite stark. So if we talk about people who have
a vision impairment of some sort, whether it's been prevented
or treated already, people who do wear glasses, for example,

(13:36):
we're talking that more than 2.2 billion people globally. Of those,
at least 1.1 billion people have a condition that has
could have been prevented or is yet to be treated.
Within that group, at least 80 million people have a
condition of blindness or vision impairment that is not preventable

(14:01):
at this point in time and need access to assistive technology,
skills was development and universal access in the community. So
they're the numbers in the Western Pacific region, which I
have the privilege and honor. And it's a bit humbling
to think about, really to represent are the members in
the western rim of the Pacific Ocean, which ranges from

(14:22):
up in Mongolia, China, Japan, Korea through Southeast Asia, you know, Laos, Cambodia,
Vietnam down through Australia and the Pacific, Pacific Islands, Samoa, Fiji,
Tonga and all the way down to New Zealand. So
37 countries in all, and we have around about 27
members within those countries. And in terms of blindness and

(14:47):
vision impairment, around about 90 million people have a condition
who are blind or moderate to severe vision impairment. And
of those around about 10 million people who are blind,
that number zooms up. If you think about conditions like presbyopia,
which is otherwise known as near vision impairment. Um, those
numbers go up even more. Some of the conditions that

(15:10):
are particularly prevalent in this region and Australia's in this region,
of course, are uncorrected refractive error. So people who need
a pair of glasses here in Australia, we kind of
often take it for granted that we can get a
pair of glasses. But we do know that somewhere in
the vicinity of two out of three people who need
a pair of glasses globally don't actually have a pair.

(15:32):
We also know here in Australia that if you are
Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, you're three times more likely
to need a pair of glasses or have vision impairment
than non-Indigenous Australians. So it's an issue that, like Jonathan
said earlier, pervades different countries, but people and communities within
countries as well. So my role. I mean, I'm really

(15:52):
excited by the role. I've got sort of two things
in my list right now. One is advancing the global summit,
and that means trying to look at engaging our members,
engaging countries within this region to both number one attend
the summit. Number two, commit to making tangible commitments in

(16:17):
policy and practice and funding and regulation for those commitments,
and to really kind of lean in and activate the
base of the eye health sector within countries in the region.
That's number one. And then number two at the moment,
you know, I'm a newbie, so I'm really keen to
be listening and talking to our members and understanding what's

(16:38):
the world like for them, what's keeping them up at night,
what do they need to focus on? And from an
IP perspective, what can IP be do to help?

S1 (16:48):
Speaking of newbies, I mean Jonathan's very, very new to
the world of newbie.

S2 (16:54):
What am.

S1 (16:54):
I? Yeah. In terms of his involvement with Iapb, he's
just recently dived into that world. But it'd be great
to just get the perspective of both of you as
two people with lived experience of blindness at very different
stages of engagement with Iapb. So Jonathan will come to

(17:16):
you and get your thoughts and feelings.

S2 (17:18):
Yeah, so my blindness is not avoidable. I was born
with what the you know, an inherited retinal disease is
the technical term for it. But I came into this
conference with Iapb making a real commitment to think about
how they include people who are blind or vision impaired.

(17:39):
And they came up with an actually a really brilliant idea,
which is really worth highlighting, which was that they employed
optometry students from Nepal as sighted guides to assist people
who were attending the conference. And I think the real
benefit of that was that the optometry students felt like
they were getting something out of it. They felt like

(18:01):
they were benefiting from it by being able to attend
a conference that they would otherwise not have afforded to
go to. And so it was there was this equitable
relationship that I had where I was getting something I
could go, where I wanted to go when I wanted
to go there. But the student was also getting something.
I'm seeing IPB at a bit of an inflection point,

(18:22):
where they are starting to think a little bit more
about rehabilitation, as is the technical term, and about what
happens when people have gone blind. I initially went thinking, oh,
I don't know anything about this, and there's nothing I
could possibly contribute. You know, I'm just going to sit
and listen. But then I think there is something great
that we do in Australia and in some parts of

(18:45):
the world that I think is really important, which is
increasingly through things like vision 2020, the eye health sector
is being connected to each other. So as you said,
Brandon before, we're connecting in optometry and ophthalmology to assistive technology,
to occupational therapy, to orientation and mobility. We're not having

(19:06):
these things separated with an impenetrable wall between them. And
I think that's the thing that might change over time. IPB.

S3 (19:14):
It's funny, Jonathan, you may have thought you were coming
on a holiday, but we put you to work pretty hard.
And interestingly, one of the things that does happen at
these conferences where there's a formal conference component, but because
we're trying to make use of people coming together from
all over the world, like you said, 59 countries, we
have other work group meetings the day before, but there

(19:37):
was also other global summit meetings, and poor Jonathan was
roped into all of the above. So we put him
to work pretty hard.

S1 (19:46):
Oh, fantastic. Okay. Well, I might get some final thoughts
from you both. So Jonathan will come to you. And
what do you look forward to in the future of
Iapb and the work you're also doing elsewhere in the
various hats you're wearing at the moment?

S2 (20:05):
Yeah. I really think that this was my first and
won't be my last insight live. I think that it
was a great group of people that I got talking to,
and honestly, it made me feel happy that there are
people all over the world trying to work through the
same problems, and I'm looking forward to using that collective

(20:26):
global wisdom more in my own work.

S1 (20:29):
Okay. And Brandon, just come to you for a final wrap.

S3 (20:33):
Sure. Just before I do that, I did want to
say that one of the things that was terrific and
it was really amazing to have Jonathan part of it
there was the launch of a disability inclusion work group
as part of the official Iapb work groups, and that
group will be really looking about how do we infuse

(20:55):
disability inclusion throughout the work of the Iapb. And Jonathan
was part of that conversation and has some actions to
take forward. So I think that's a a really great
sign for me having Jonathan come to the conference. I'm
often one of maybe 1 or 2 people who who
are blind at the conference, and we need more people
who are blind coming to the conference and sharing their

(21:16):
stories 100%. So going forward, I mean, I the big
the big ticket really moving forward is to make the
Global Summit on eHealth live and create the movement for
change that goes way beyond an event that we need
to have both various political campaigns that build up to
and bring governments to the table. There will be the

(21:39):
summit itself, but it goes way beyond that. We'll have
an accountability framework. So what I would like your listeners
to think about is how might you get involved in
talking to local members or even talking to vision 2020 Australia,
or even coming to Vision Australia and asking, you know,
what are you doing around supporting the global summit? Because

(22:01):
we've got actions that need to happen here, here, here
at home in Australia. And this is a platform where
we can both create change here in Australia and then
take that learning, take those commitments to be part of
that global movement.

S1 (22:14):
Well, on that note, I think we might wrap up there.
I've been speaking today with Brandon Hartung and Jonathan Craig about, well,
what haven't we talked about today? The 2030 Insight conference,
which recently wrapped up in Kathmandu and Nepal, the plans
around the Global Eye Health Summit, Brandon being sworn in

(22:37):
as the Western Pacific chair of Iapb. And Jonathan and
Brandon's thoughts about being involved with Iapb at different stages
of their engagement with the organization. So we're very keen
to keep tabs on both of those stories and have
you back on the program in the coming months and years.

(22:58):
So thank you very much to you both for making
some time to chat with me today. It's been an
absolute pleasure.

S2 (23:05):
Thank you.

S3 (23:06):
I'd love to and looking forward to another chat.