By Philip Tengzu
Charia, (UW/R), Feb. 20, GNA – About 700 school children in the Charia Circuit in the Wa Municipality have undergone free eye screening organised by Bliss Eye Care, a private eye clinic in Wa, in partnership with the Wa Municipal Education Directorate.
As part of the intervention, children diagnosed with any eye condition were offered free medication while those requiring eyeglasses were also offered for free.
The intervention by the Bliss Eye Clinic formed part of efforts of the clinic and its partner, Ghana Vision, a Switzerland-based organisation, to help mitigate the challenges some children face in engaging in active teaching and learning due to some eye conditions they might be suffering from.
Some of the eye conditions screened were refractive errors and conjunctivitis (infective and allergy), while some children diagnosed with glaucoma were referred to the health facility for treatment.
One student diagnosed with autism and site issues was also referred to the Upper West Regional Hospital for further attention.
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Charia after the screening exercise, Mr Abudi Issahaku, the Wa Municipal Coordinator of the School Health Education Programme (SHEP), appealed to parents to take their children to a health facility for a check-up as soon as they detected any eye condition.
He said children were facing a lot of vision problems in school and “we thought that parents would have taken it as a responsibility, but most parents are not taking it seriously.
“It is only when you don’t visit the school that you don’t see these problems are occurring but if you actually go on a school visit to see how some children are struggling to see from the board it is very disturbing,” he explained.
Dr Zakaria Al-hassan Balure, the founder and Manager of Bliss Eye Care, expressed concern about the attitude of some parents allowing only their little children to attend the screening exercise.
He said some of the children might not be able to follow the instructions given to them in taking the medication while others might throw the medicine away.
“If we do everything and give the best medication and it is not well done, it’s like we’ve not done anything, it doesn’t go anywhere.
“This is a lot of cost so if it goes and it doesn’t get anywhere it doesn’t equally make us happy,” Dr Balure added.
Mr Martin Roost, the President of Ghana Vision, observed that their support for Bliss Eye Care became necessary due to the windy and sandy weather condition of the region.
He said sand and wind posed a serious risk to the eye conditions of people and that the education of children would not be successful without good eyes.
He commended a Ghanaian goalkeeper based in Switzerland, Mr Ati Zigi, for his continuous support to the Vision Ghana team to also render humanitarian services to people.
Mr Abubakar Alhassan, a teacher at the Charia Junior High School “B,” commended Bliss Eye Care and its partners for the exercise and said it would help improve collective learning at the school.
The Bliss Eye Care, under its Blissful Sight for Kids project, had been organising free eye screening for school children in the Upper West Region for close to a decade now and had since impacted thousands of children in the region.
GNA