Blindness prevention plan in the making
Health officials from central and Central Highland provinces met in Hue city on August 21 to draft a plan for blindness prevention.
The event, co-hosted by the Vietnam National Steering Committee for Prevention of Blindness (VNSCPB) and Vietnam National Institute of Ophthalmology (VNIO), is in respond to the programme “Vision 2020” initiated by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The VNSCPB’s report shows that blindness prevalence in 16 surveyed provinces and cities in 2007 was 3.1 percent. Leading causes of blindness are cataract (66.1 percent), followed by retinopathy, glaucoma, refractive error, and trachoma.
Meanwhile, health workers are in short supply in mountainous areas of the Central Highlands.
The lack of doctors and nurses specialising in ophthalmology at district-level clinics is a huge challenge for the eye care services in Vietnam, it said.
The workshop focused on designing a concrete action plan for provinces and cities from Thanh Hoa to Ninh Thuan, which will serve as a basis for the national blindness prevention plan.
Participants agreed to strengthen the training of eye care workers, develop eye care services, as well as provide necessary eye care equipment for clinics at provincial, district and grassroots level.
They emphasised the need to prevent and treat eye diseases for all people regardless of age, gender and social class.
In 2013, the WHO and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) put forth a Global Action Plan for 2014-2019 with the aim of reducing the prevalence of avoidable visual impairment by 25 percent by the year 2019 from the baseline of 2010.