Dualta Roughneen
CEO, Christian Blind Mission (CBM) Ireland
Imagine the frustration of a being health worker when a child’s preventable blindness results from a lack of basic screening, broken equipment, power outages or parents making the impossible choice between food and healthcare.
A new project using ARCLIGHT technology aims to consign such barriers to the dustbin of history. The ARCLIGHT is cheap, light, hardy and solar-powered. Community health workers with minimal training can use it to incorporate eye screening into their infant care home visits. Problems can then be spotted early, in time to save a child’s eyesight.
New child blindness programme
At Christian Blind Mission (CBM) Ireland, we started a new programme in Madagascar aiming to bridge the training, equipment and resourcing gaps that result in preventable infant blindness in rural areas of Madagascar. Consider this: young children need to have their eyes screened and tested in case they have eye health issues that could result in loss of sight. This needs to be done early because if the child’s eyes and brain do not learn to process light imagery at an early age, it will never gain that function later.
Rural healthcare challenges
Yet, in rural areas of Madagascar, this screening is not happening. Health workers often have to travel by foot, pedal bike or motorcycle – over bumpy mountain roads. They don’t have the equipment they need.
One frontline health worker in Madagascar recently shared: “We don’t have transport, so we walk as far as 12km one way to do outreach for vaccinations and for consultations. The electricity supply for our health centre is from the mains. There are a lot of power outages. Our autoclave is broken, and we haven’t been able to get it repaired. If a patient comes with a large wound, we have to refer them immediately to the hospital, as we know we don’t have sterile equipment to deal with it.”
Young children need to have their eyes
screened and tested in case they have eye
health issues that could result in loss of sight.
Affordable, durable ophthalmoscope
Screening equipment for preventable blindness in children is expensive and fragile. It isn’t built for daily 70km motorcycle rides on dirt roads, nor is it feasible to provide each health worker with a €5,000 piece of equipment. Plus, the electricity supply is intermittent, so the ophthalmoscope may be without power when it is needed.
The low-cost, low-tech ophthalmoscope — ARCLIGHT — developed by the University of St. Andrews School of Medicine, hopes to overcome those challenges and save the sight of children before it is tragically too late. This tackles the demand barrier.
Limited surgery access
However, the supply barrier remains. Necessary surgery is only available at major hospitals. There are few ophthalmologists in Madagascar. So, when a child is diagnosed with a condition, parents often struggle with surgery costs, transport from rural areas to major hospitals, plus accommodation to stay near their child during the procedure.
CBM Ireland’s work supports the parents, and the hospital, to ensure the child does not miss out on this life-changing surgery. We help the parents pay for the surgery but also ensure hospitals have the right equipment and necessary sterile environment — and assist with aftercare.
