2,365 Visually Impaired Receive Free Eye Treatment In Rivers

An estimated 2,365 visually impaired persons in Rivers State have received free eye care services at the Lulu-Briggs Foundation, Port Harcourt.
The care services range from eye test to treatment and surgeries.
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.
Lulu-Briggs, who stated this during a three-day free eyecare 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, thus resulting 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’’, she said.
Lulu-Briggs said further that, “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 4,000 optometrists and 700 ophthalmologists serving our population of 200million. Apparently 80percent of these eye care professionals are in private practice with high financial cost and additional barriers to those seeking eye care”.
She said one billion of the world’s 2.2billion cases of vision impairment and blindness are preventable according to the Nigeria Optometrist Association, while about 50million Nigerians have some form of vision disability or the other with the commonest conditions been cataract, glaucoma, dry eye and conjunctivitis.
The Tide reports that the Lulu Briggs Foundation has since 2005 provided free medical care to Niger Delta people.
This includes provision of 39 eye care clinics, free medication and surgeries, while 29,096 glasses were also dispensed to visually impaired persons.
The three-day screening, diagnostic and provision of medicine and dispensing of glasses exercise attended to 2,365 people while 991 glasses were dispensed.
No fewer than 214 eye surgeries and other hospital based procedures are scheduled to be carried out at a later date in batches.
The Foundation, during the exercise, also awarded 114 law students in the region the sum of N120,000 and a brand new laptop each to assist them in their studies.

By: Tonye Nria-Dappa & Theresa Frederick