Report on Eye Care Camp and MoU with Charity Vision International, April 2024

On Friday 19^th April, 2024, we held a massive eye screening exercise at our offices, where construction is still ongoing. We also signed a memorandum of understanding with Charity Vision International.

The turn out was enormous – a large number of patients were unable to wait until late at night, due to an extraordinarily long waiting line. Many people were screened and taken care of according to their need, i.e. some got eye drops and others reading glasses. On the same day, we were honored by being visited by the national coordinator of Charity Vision International, with whom we were able to sign a memorandum of understanding between our two organizations and agreed to work together in fighting preventable blindness.

Achievements

We successfully screened patients and handled some cases that we had the ability to.

We signed a memorandum of understanding between GAF Eye Health Foundation and Charity Vision International.

We also sensitized the community about the epidemic of red eye disease that is becoming so rampant and infectious in the country.

We were able to buy an audio speaker for addressing crowds and offering eye health education sessions.

We dispensed reading glasses and eye drops to the people in need freely.

Interventions Done for Patients

Conditions Diagnosed

Challenges

• Limited space to accommodate the patients and all other concerned personnel during the screening exercise due to large numbers of patients who showed up.
• Difficulty in transportation of equipment plus volunteers in the community for sensitization.
• Limited funds to support cataract surgeries since we diagnosed many patients who need the cataract surgery.
• Lack of models for proper and efficient training of the community about eye health and care.
• Insufficient intervention measures for the diagnosed patients like reading glasses, eye drops, cataract surgeries.
• A good number of people expected to get other medical services like orthopedics, dental and E.N.T. (ear, nose and throat), which was not available unfortunately.
• Many patients of cataract were referred yet they actually not able to fund the surgeries. This was so because the facility has not yet attained machines that can do the surgeries.
• We also had unfavorable weather conditioned like heavy rains, and since we had limited space to accommodate all the patients, most of them were victimized by this weather.

Recommendations

• We need to expand the land of the facility to at least accommodate most of the patients to prevent them from being victimized by the unfavorable weather conditions.
• A greatest need is to complete building the offices so that we can offer cataract surgery at our offices to reduce costs incurred in transporting and paying for cataract surgery in different places/hospitals.
• There is a need to purchase a means of transport, to carry equipment and volunteers around the community for proper sensitization.
• We need to include other medical services like dental and orthopedics to cater for those individuals that always come expecting them.
• We need to purchase customized models to aid in eye health education.
• We need to increase the number of interventions to cater for all the patients, like reading glasses, eye drops and others.

Conclusion

I appreciate all our fans on our social media platforms especially YouTube, for the support towards these activities. I also appreciate Charity Vision International for agreeing to work with us in the struggle to fight preventable blindness in communities. We still welcome any other collaboration to avoid preventable blindness in all undeserved communities.

Complied by:

WEKWANYA AMBROSE

C.E.O./Founder

+256 787 999781 

Photographs