Sankara Eye Hospital Screens over 22,500 Children on the eve of Children’s Day

Bengaluru: Sankara Eye Hospital, one of the premier eye hospitals in the country dedicated towards making India visually wealthy and eliminating needless blindness in India screened 22,500 school children for preventive blindness on the eve of Children’s Day across India for free. Out of these 13,486 school children were screened in Bengaluru, wherein 701 kids were identified to have refractive error. 390 children of these 701 were then referred to the hospital for further secondary evaluation.

The eye screening camps were held at Kendriya Vidyalaya MEG & Center, St. John’s Road, Kendriya Vidyalaya, M G Railway Colony, Kendriya Vidyalaya, NAL campus, Jeevan Bima Nagar and Army Public School, K. Kamaraj Road and in dedicated centres earmarked for 38 other schools in Kanakapura -both government and private. The mass eye screening camp for children was replicated at Sankara’s centres in Anand, Kanpur, Shimoga, Coimbatore, Vijayawada and Guntur. A total of 9,071 school children were screened at these centres.

It is estimated that there are approximately 15 million blind people in India and 75% of these are cases of avoidable blindness. The main motivation for the mega eye screening camp was to detect vision errors at an early stage and prevent avoidable blindness in children. More than often, delay in diagnosis leads to further complications and deteriorated vision. Initiatives such as these will help kids to identify their vision errors and perform better than before. The hospital will now look forward to validate the massive record for successfully screening most number of children on a single day.

At Kanakapura, the teachers did the preliminary eye checkup of the students before sending the shortlisted students detected with vision errors to the hospital for a secondary evaluation. On 3rd November, 42 Teachers were trained, so that they could conduct vision screening in Kanakapura today. The primary screening was done under the supervision of the Sankara Team. Students and teachers from Sankara’s College of Optometry and staff from Sankara Eye Hospital participated in making the screening successful. The screening included Distance Vision Test, Near Vision Test, Color Vision Test and Anterior Examination.