Shine a light on World Sight Day

World Sight Day on Thursday, 10 October 2019 puts the focus this year on the great strides made to light up the lives of people who are blind or have impaired vision.

Here in South Africa there is so much to be done with an estimated 400,000 people already blind – with approximately 240,000 of these people going blind from cataracts.

Vision is a major health challenge and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness projects that an ageing world population, myopia and diabetic retinopathy are set to increase vision impairment in the coming decades.

The shocking fact, however, is that more than three out of four of those don’t need to live in the dark.

Luckily there is good news, also, because blindness and poor vision can be reduced and even prevented if people have access to primary eye care and life-changing eye surgeries.
With the correct intervention, which sometimes may be as simple as the right pair of spectacles, they would be able to see better.

Which makes the work that South African NGO Grace Vision does all the more important.

Grace Vision provides free, high quality primary eye care to the rural Eastern Cape, one of the poorest regions of the poorest provinces in our country.
Cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration are prevalent here and the Grace Vision team provides free cataract removal surgeries and vision restoration procedures to those who need it most but can least afford it.
It also has found that children are often tasked with caring for the blind person in the family, and this disempowers them as far as their formal education is concerned.
This means that the work done by Grace Vision restores not only sight but also a family’s dignity and quality of life.

Grace Vision has several annual objectives:

• Screen the elderly and then attend to their vision needs;
• Identify the onset of cataracts and do surgery when needed;
• Screen school children and provide them with spectacles where needed.

A growing number of children with treatable vision impairments do not have access to the treatment they need but Grace Vision is on a mission to change this.
“We only work in deep rural parts of our country where no one else seems to want to go to,” says CEO John Rae.

By July 2019 the team of 15 had screened more than 100,000 patients, most of them children.
 “The number of patients daily who come for eye examinations and treatment has in some cases increased fivefold,” says Rae.
“We have achieved one of our objectives, which was to re-establish confidence in the community that reliable eye care could be possible.”

The statistics are substantial:

• 65 702 children screened
• 42 018 adults screened
• 14289 spectacles given out
• 1731 cataract surgeries performed

It takes many to make a difference and Spec-Savers plays its part in letting South African children shine through its Kids Right to Good Sight programme.

Since 2008 it has have helped nearly 300 000 children through the Kids Right to Good Sight initiative.
With parents' permission, Spec-Savers offers a free eye test, pair of frames (from the kiddie’s range) and 2 clear single vision lenses for South African children aged 6 to 12 years and this can dramatically improve their lives.