An estimated 2,365 visually impaired people in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, have received free eye care services ranging from free eye tests to treatment and surgeries at “Lulu Briggs Foundation”.
Chairman of the Foundation, Dr Siene Lulu Briggs, said the foundation’s goal was to help treat vision impairment and prevent blindness among Nigerians by encouraging timely access to quality eye care rehabilitation.
Briggs, who stated this during a 3-day free eye care outreach to both adults and children in Port Harcourt, noted that the exercise was to commemorate the celebration of the foundation’s 21st anniversary of its service to humanity.
She said a free eye care team comprising optometrists and ophthalmologists were on ground to attend to those who were experiencing problems with their visions at no cost to the patients.
She lamented that people took eye care for granted, which she observed had resulted in preventable visual impairment and blindness.
“We tend to take our vision for granted. Sight is the most prominent of human sense organs, it is central to every aspect of our lives.
“In Nigeria, routine eye checks are uncommon, access to quality eye care is constrained by the wider challenges in our health care system.
“Nigeria has only four thousand optometrists and seven hundred ophthalmologists serving our population of two hundred million.
“Apparently, eighty percent of these eye care professionals are in private practice with high financial cost and additional barriers to those seeking eye care”, she said.
Briggs also said one billion of the world’s population of 2.2 billion cases of vision impairment and blindness are preventable according to the Nigeria Optometrist Association, while about fifty million Nigerians have one form of vision disability or the other with the commonest conditions being cataract, glaucoma, dry eye and conjunctivitis”.
The Lulu Briggs Foundation, she said, has since 2005 provided free medical care to Niger Delta dwellers, including eye clinics which have provided 39 eye care clinics, free surgeries, medicines, dispensed 29,096 glasses and raised awareness about the importance of preventive eye diseases.
It used the opportunity to award 114 law students in the region the sum of N120,000 and a brand new laptop each to assist them in their studies.
The 3-day screening, diagnostics and provision of medicine and dispensing of glasses exercise attended to 2,365 people, 991 glasses were dispensed, while 214 eye surgeries and other hospital based procedures were scheduled to be carried out at a later date in batches.

By: Tonye Nria-Dappa & Theresa Frederick