Experts at the school eye health workshop.
The Ministry of Public Health recently held a workshop on school eye health , bringing in more than 50 physicians, nurses and health professionals working at private and community schools here.
The event highlighting one of the priorities of the ministry, children’s right to sight, was organised by the health promotion and non-communicable diseases department targeting students of private schools.
During workshop specialists from Blindness Prevention Programme presented lectures about common eye diseases affecting students and early detection of refractive errors and visual impairment.
Poor vision in childhood affects negatively the children's academic school performance, the experts said during the lecture.
There was a practical training on how to examine vision of students as screening is obligatory in all schools in which nurses should know how to fill electronic screening forms following guidelines and referring students with abnormal vision results to ophthalmologists to be diagnosed and managed properly.
“If we collaborate together to detect causes of low vision in school students in Qatar, we will definitely reduce the prevalence of low vision within children who have a high probability to get refractive errors, strabismus, lazy eye and other eye diseases,” said Dr Kholoud Al Mutawa, head of non-communicable disease section at the ministry while opening the workshop.
Blindness Prevention Programme has been conducting several training workshops since past many years and supervised the process of vision screening either in the independent and private schools of selected grades, 1,3,5,7, and 9.
Vision screening reports and recommendations have been released and in collaboration with WHO, the last report demonstrated a total number of 35,000 students, out of them 15 percent have vision less than normal.
