EYE TEST HITS THE ROAD FOR BABIES
IT is a three-minute eye test that can help save premature and small babies from blindness.
But until now it has required an ambulance ride back and forth across town, or an extended stay on a newborn intensive care unit for this precious cargo to get the check.
A new Royal Women’s Hospital service in Melbourne is allowing preterm babies, like Lyra Clarke born at 26 weeks and five days gestation, to be tested for their risk of a serious eye disease closer to home.
The Eyes on the Road program has seen three neonatal nurses do the work of ophthalmologists and travel to the Northern Hospital once a fortnight for the past 18 months. They have expanded to Box Hill Hospital, the Angliss and the Women’s at Sandringham.
Babies born before 30 weeks or under 1250g are most at risk of retinopathy of prematurity, an abnormal growth of blood vessels at the back of the eye, and are screened from 30 weeks.
Neonatal nurse Bernadette Golding said the disease improved and caused no longterm damage in many cases, but early detection was vital.
“If we don’t treat it … the baby can have severe visual impairment or blindness,” Ms Golding said. AN INDEPENDENT review has recommended the federal government change the way it funds private schools from one that relies on census data to a system that uses parents’ capacity to pay.
The current methodology, introduced by the Howard government, bases funding on the average socio-economic scores (SES) for the census district a school is located in.
But the National School Resourcing Board says parental income would be a better measure to determine funding.
“Capacity to contribute” would be based on the median income of parents at the school.