POOR ATTENTION TO EYE CARE WORRIES DR DEBRAH (PAGE 42, OCT 20, 2010)

THE Head of the National Eye Care Unit of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Oscar Debrah, has expressed concern about the lack of attention given to eye care as compared to diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS or tuberculosis.
He said unlike the attention other sectors of the healthcare services were receiving across the country in recent times, eye care in particular lacked specialists in the Upper West and the Volta regions while the Northern, Upper East and the Brong Ahafo regions had a specialist each even though Accra alone had 54 eye specialists.
Dr Debrah expressed the concern when he addressed a durbar in Wa, the Upper West regional capital, to mark the launch of the national edition of the world sight day.
“Poverty and blindness go hand-in-hand so if Ghana as a country wants to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), then we have to pay much attention to eye care”, he stated.
Dr Debrah, therefore, called on the Director-General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to help address the problem.
The event, although national in character, attracted an unimpressive crowd, who went on a float through the principal streets of Wa before converging on the jubilee park for the durbar.
It was on the theme: “Count down to vision 2020: The right to sight, how far have we come?
Health personnel took turns to take members of the public through several medical and health checks including, eye care, blood pressure and Voluntary Counselling and Testing of HIV status.
Dr Debrah, who is an ophthalmologist, lamented that throughout the country, when it came to infrastructure for optical services, it was always an afterthought and questioned why in most cases, many of those facilities were sited close to the mortuary.
On the furnishing of those structures, Dr Debrah said, “We always have the worst of equipment, which are very archaic and obsolete,” adding that it was unfortunate that the Ministry of Health was not investing in eyecare equipment.
He mentioned cataract, glaucoma and trachoma as the major causes of blindness in the country.
Dr Debrah explained that cataract was the leading cause of blindness across the country contributing to over 50 per cent of blind cases.
He said about 46,000 surgeries would have to be conducted in a year if people were to be prevented from going blind through cataract infections.
On Trachoma, Dr Debrah called for intensive surveillance to identify and attend to new cases before it got out of hand.
He said due to some interventions such as child immunisation, blind cases, particularly among children in the Northern and Upper West regions had declined considerably.
Touching on Glaucoma, he stated that it was inherited from relations, adding that over 600,000 people across the country had the disease but 90 per cent of those people were not aware that they had it.
He commended various institutions, including the Standard Chartered Bank, the Swiss Red Cross and Sight Savers, for their immense contribution to eye care in the country over the years.
In a speech read on his behalf, the Minister of Health, Dr Benjamin Kunbour, expressed the support of the government to improve on eye care in the country.
He called for the integration of primary eye care into the primary healthcare systems to enable eye health to receive the necessary recognition it deserved.
The Upper West Regional Director of the GHS, Dr Alexis Nang Beifubah, said with the support of the Catholic Church and the Swiss Red Cross, the region could now boast eye care services in all the district health facilities.
He added that the challenge currently was the non-availability of a resident ophthalmologist.
Dr Beifubah, however, appealed to the people to take advantage of the existing facilities rather than visiting quack doctors for such care.