Embrace the call for action on world sight day
WORLD Sight Day (WSD) is an annual day of awareness that is held on the second Thursday of October every year and this year the call to action is vision first.
WSD aims to draw attention to blindness and visual impairment across the world while also raising public awareness of blindness and visual impairment as major public health issues.
The latest figures estimate that there are 36 million people in the world who are blind, in addition to 217 million people that have moderate or severe visual impairment. If we have a closer look at these groups, 124 million people have uncorrected refractive errors (vision that will improve with glasses) and 65 million have cataracts (vision that may improve with surgery) — therefore, more than 75 per cent of all 'blindness' and moderate/ severe visual impairment is avoidable. Apart from these statistics above, it is interesting to also note that 89 per cent of visually impaired people live in low and middle income countries (such as the Pacific Islands).
In Fiji and the developing countries of this region, we therefore see a disproportionately large number of people that have lost their sight or are struggling with vision unnecessarily.
Although there has been a lot of focus on NCDs (heart disease, diabetes, blood pressure etc) and bringing attention to how Fiji is struggling to control our rates of these diseases — what most people don't realise is that these same conditions are also having a profound negative effect on sight and therefore are contributing to the visual impairment figures noted above.
At Optique Eye Care, it's very common for our optometrists to discover signs during our examinations that are associated with these NCDs and very often our patients don't even realise that they have these changes.
Globally, our profession has changed from just prescribing spectacles to being more involved in the care of our patients eyes and preventing avoidable vision loss. As a primary care profession, your optometrist should not only be able to give you better sight through testing your eyes for spectacles but also be able to thoroughly examine inside your eyes for any signs and symptoms of change.
Remember that when small changes are picked up early, you give yourself the best chance of taking steps to prevent larger (and often irreversible) changes.
We only have one set of eyes so lets all embrace the call for action on world sight day and put our vision first.