There are up to 3 million Vietnamese children having to wear glasses.
At the Conference on assessing and developing a priority plan for eye care in Vietnam held on June 6, Dr. Nguyen Chi Dung - Central Eye Hospital gave figures showing that the whole country has 3 million children aged 5-16 needing glasses.
People with refractive eye defects have a prevalence of 15-40% of the population, in which children are the most susceptible to refractive errors.
It is noteworthy that the rate of refractive errors in urban students is about 40-50% and in rural areas from 10-15%, of which about 10% of poor students need financial support to buy glasses.
Photo is for illustration purposes only. - Source: Internet
The reason why children have high refractive errors is because they choose a place to study with poor lighting. In particular, modern life with exposure to devices such as television, playing video games, computers, reading a lot of stories... makes the rate of refractive errors even higher.
Regarding blindness prevention, Professor-Doctor Do Nhu Hon - Director of the Central Eye Hospital said that currently Vietnam has about 500,000 blind people and 1.5 million visually impaired people.
Among the main causes of blindness today, cataracts account for 66%, glaucoma accounts for 6.5%, and surgical complications account for 4.1%.
Mr. Hon assessed that compared to 10 years ago, the number of blind people has decreased significantly due to the attention and assistance of the government and domestic and foreign organizations. However, there is still a big difficulty in preventing blindness today because many poor patients do not have money for treatment.
A recent national survey found that about 10-30% of poor patients do not have money to pay for examination, treatment and surgery for eye diseases.
The reality is that health insurance can only pay 80% of the cost for patients in the right line and 30% of patients with a card to go beyond the line. Some opinions raised at the workshop suggested that the Ministry of Health and health insurance could pay 80% of the cost of cataract surgery for patients having cataract surgery at any level.
In addition, the training of human resources in ophthalmology is still thin and lacking. Typically, the whole Binh Dinh province has only 31 ophthalmologists, so the ratio of 1 ophthalmologist in the province will serve 48,000 people.
Therefore, most of the recommendations made at the conference focused on the issue that in the coming time, Vietnam needs to come up with specific plans and strategies to help the poor and increase training of more ophthalmologists.
According to Vietnam+
