Tema, Jan 20, GNA – The Ghana Optometric Association (GOA) has indicated that the assessment of only the visual acuity of people as a requirement for acquiring a driver’s license was a contributing factor to road crashes.
Mr Alfred Gardemor GOA Public Relations Officer said visual acuity was the only visual function assessed for the acquisition of driving licensing in Ghana; “For visual fields, a binocular field of at least 120° horizontal and 40° verticals is required”.
Dr Gardemor stated at Ghana News Agency-Tema Regional Office and the Ghana Optometric Association fortnight public sensitization initiative “GNA-GOA: My Eye! My Vision!
The initiative is a collaborative public education advocacy campaign to promote the need for eye care and to draw attention to vision health.
The GNA-GOA: My Eyes! My Vision! The initiative also seeks to challenge the public and policymakers to focus on vision as a health issue, which forms a critical component of mankind’s wellbeing but is often neglected.
Speaking on the topic: “Vision and Night Driving; The Challenges,” Dr. Gardemor, said notwithstanding the fact that it was important to be able to correctly judge distances and speed involved in automobile traffic, binocular stereopsis was not the most important depth cue as according to him, persons who lost one eye would regain adequate distance judgments after an adaptation period.
He said the laws on driving in Ghana were deficient on the cut-off measure in the worse eye of a driver.
Dr. Gardemor who is the Optometrist at the Nsawam Government Hospital added that even though visual field (how wide an area the eyes can see when focusing on a central point) was also a requirement for driving in Ghana, most of the tests did not take care of that.
He said the importance of vision in driving could not be overemphasized noting that it was one thing that was often overlooked, saying sometimes road crashes were attributed to human error, and other factors, but whether or not the person had good eyesight is ignored.
“Good vision is one of the main and essential ingredients needed to drive an automobile, driving is a vision depended on task, without vision you can’t drive properly,” he said.
He said, “Vision is the most important thing for driving, and road safety, it is needed to see the road and everything on it, it is needed to protect pedestrians, identify road hazards, road signs and see indicators, on the dashboard.”
Dr Kwame Yeboah, Optometrist at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital contributing to the discussion observed that there was the need to also check colour vision which helped drivers to identify traffic signals, brake lights, and other indicator lights on vehicles; while contrast sensitivity also helped to see pedestrians, lights and road sings in bad weather and at night.
He added that checking glare sensitivity accounted for the eye not being able to capture a lot of light which blurs the vision at night, and said it was important to assess this, especially when going for a long drive.
Mr. Francis Ameyibor GNA Tema Regional Manager called on the management of corporate bodies to ensure that staff undertook regular “maintenance of the eye” which is a critical component of factors of labour but often ignored.
“Visual impairment affects production as it has the potential to reduce staff input, a corporate driver with poor vision endangers the life of staff, we must make your sure our drivers both commercial or private adhere to GOA call for an annual eye check,” Mr Ameyibor noted.
GNA