Ministry workshop focuses on schoolchildren’s eye health

The health promotion and non-communicable diseases department at the Ministry Of Public Health (MoPH) recently organised a workshop on school eye health, targeting students of private schools. The workshop was held as one of the priorities of the ministry is children’s right to sight, according to a press statement.The workshop targeted more than 50 physicians, nurses and health professionals working for private and community schools in Qatar. During the workshop, specialists from the Blindness Prevention Programme (MoPH) delivered lectures on common eye diseases affecting students and the early detection of refractive errors and visual impairment because poor vision in childhood negatively affects their academic school performance.There was a practical training on how to examine the vision of students as screening is obligatory in all schools. 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.Dr Kholoud al-Mutawa, head of the non-communicable diseases section at the MoPH, opened the workshop and said: “When we collaborate to detect causes of low vision in school students in the State of Qatar, we will definitely reduce the prevalence of low vision within children who have a high probability of getting refractive errors, strabismus, lazy eye and other eye diseases.” The Blindness Prevention Programme has been conducting training workshops for many years and supervised the process of vision screening in 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 the World Health Organisation, the last report demonstrates a total number of 35,000 students, of whom 15% have less than normal (6/6) vision, the statement notes.