"Without early intervention, children with low vision will face many challenges, because the blind associations only focus on job creation and illiteracy elimination through Braille teaching," said deputy head of the National Eye Hospital's Refractive Errors Faculty Nguyen Thi Thu Hien at a workshop on eye care and rehabilitation for people with low vision yesterday.
Hien said in 2012, for the first time, hundreds of children with low vision were screened for visual ability before entering the first grade at the Nguyen Dinh Chieu School in Hanoi's Hai Ba Trung District thanks to a project conducted by the hospital's Eye Rehabilitation Centre and the German CBM Organisation.
These tests allowed doctors to see that among the 40 blind students in the school, 10 were not completely blind - they only suffered from low vision.
"With vision rehabilitation measures, they could study as normal students instead of learning Braille with blind students," said Hien.
The World Health Organisation defines low vision as a condition where even with regular glasses, contact lenses, medicine or surgery, people find everyday tasks such as reading and writing, shopping, cooking and watching TV difficult. While low vision sufferers can improve their vision by taking proper rehabilitation measures, the country has no specific rehabilitation centre designed for them, so the country's 2 million low vision sufferers often fail to get the necessary care.
Rector of the Nguyen Dinh Chieu School Thai Van Khoa said that half of the students in his school suffered from low vision, but three-fourths of those students were learning at primary level.
A rehabilitation programme for low visual children like the one implemented at his school would help students with low vision nationwide improve their remaining vision and integrate better into the community, but this required support from both the education and health sectors, according to Khoa.
Thanks to his school's rehabilitation programme, half of the school's 145 students had moved to studying the curriculum for non-visually impaired students, he said, adding that he expected the school's model to be replicated nation-wide.
But the hospital's centre, along with another centre in HCM City, are so far the only two rehabilitation centres for people with low vision in Vietnam.
Health expert calls for improving low vision rehabilitation
Without early intervention, children with low vision will face many challenges, an official has sai.
Source: VNS
