By GNA
The Ghana Health Service (GHS) is strengthening eye care services at the community level as part of strategies to fight eye cancer in children.
Dr James Addy, Head of Eye Unit of the GHS, said it was important to empower community health nurses and midwives at the community level to be able to detect eye conditions of children early enough to prevent needless deaths.
He was speaking at a training programme for selected community health nurses and midwives on early detection of retinoblastoma and other eye conditions in children in Kumasi.
Retinoblastoma is the commonest eye cancer in children for the first five years which arises from the retina and causes blindness and without treatment would lead to death.
The training, which formed part of a project dubbed, “National Eye Screening Project”, sought to equip the nurses and midwives at the community level to detect and refer eye conditions for early treatment with the overall goal of preventing eye cancer in children.
All beneficiaries of the training were provided with a device known as arclight to examine the eyes of children at their facilities and refer those with abnormal conditions.
Funded by Rotary International through the Rotary Club of Detmold-Blomberg and Rotary Club of Accra-La East, the project is targeting 500 nurses and midwives across the country.
Dr Addy said there were only 1,500 eye care personnel in Ghana taking care of over 30 million population hence equipping other health professionals as auxiliary eye care providers was the way to go.
“We can only achieve universal eye health if we integrate primary health care providers into the mainstream eye care services because they see patients almost on daily basis,” he noted.
He said the training would go a long way to reduce the mortality rate of eye cancer in children, saying that the economic cost of blindness among children could be huge considering the number of years they lived with that condition.
Most cases of eye conditions among children, according to him, were reported to regional and teaching hospitals late and urged the beneficiaries of the training to ensure prompt referral of abnormal eye conditions.
