Sight Savers President Jeff Haddox delivers new CCTV to nine year old Autumn Green from Jacksonville, AL.

A comprehensive and timely vision health program for young children is crucial to their educational development. Sight Savers America (formerly Sight Savers of Alabama) operates such an eye care network for children

Sight Savers President Jeff Haddox delivers new CCTV to nine year old Autumn Green from Jacksonville, AL. Autumn will now be able to read, paint, do her homework and many other things which non-low vision children take for granted Over the last three years, the follow-up eye care service provided by Sight Savers has become the benchmark for the industry. Looking back ten years, when Sight Savers began, there was no comprehensive follow-up eye care program and not even agreement on what follow-up meant. Often, simple parental notification was labeled as follow-up. There is now almost universal agreement that follow-up means adopting the child’s eye care from parental notification to final follow-up ensuring that the appropriate eye care is obtained. During this process case management includes scheduling appointments, reminder calls, scheduling transportation, and recording all results at each step of the process in a database that allows measurable outcomes. This grueling process is accomplished by dedicated patient coordinators who often must do investigative work just to reach parents.

Sight Savers was conceived in 1996 when, while working as a vision scientist, I realized that poor vision was adversely affecting tens of thousands of children in our state each year. This was largely the result of poor public awareness about the importance of eye care in young children and the inability of children to recognize and articulate their vision needs. These problems were exacerbated in economically disadvantaged households by a failure to access the healthcare system and often by an inability to afford and prioritize eye care. Sight Savers now has programs in place to solve these problems, including eye clinics in rural counties like the Black Belt.

An issue close to my heart is the circumstance in which many legally blind children find themselves. Often, these children have not been evaluated in a low vision clinic for assistive technology and provided with the vision aids to make the most of their faulty vision. Sight Savers has now placed vision aids, such as closed circuit television magnifiers, in the homes of 120 Alabama children. These devices, costing as much as $2,500, magnify images up to 75 times their original size. The magnified image is then projected onto a monitor - enabling the child to read, write, and perform other educational activities.

Although funding may take another 3 to 5 years, we now can say that every legally blind child in Alabama will have the vision aid equipment that they so desperately need. From the beginning, we have operated Sight Savers from the scientific perspective of discovering a problem and fixing it. This will soon be the case for the lack of vision aids for these children. We are now beginning the task of placing assistive technology in the homes of children who are blind.

Our long-term objective at Sight Savers is to coordinate comprehensive eye care for Alabama’s children in a timely manner with follow-up services, ensuring that every Alabama child achieves their best possible vision.

As Sight Savers’ benefactor Hall Thompson summed up our work, “the whole idea is for kids to see, so they can learn to read, so they can live productive lives.”