Participatory rural appraisal to detect childhood blindness in a community

Session Details

Session Title: Orbis Free Paper Session

Session Date/Time: Monday 12/09/2016 | 11:30-12:45

Paper Time: 11:30

Venue: Room B10

First Author: : A.Deka INDIA

Co Author(s): :                        

Abstract Details

Purpose:

To evaluate the role of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) over community based rehabilitation (CBR) to detect and manage childhood blindness from rural community.

Setting:

Bawri Nethralaya/ Mission Trust, Shillong, India

Methods:

Fifteen project rural areas with preexisting CBR project were shortlisted. Main criteria of this selection were preexisting CBR project with significant number of children with visual impairment. We have adopted PRA like methodology to reach rural community aiming to detect childhood blindness. PRA approaches was also utilized to achieve immunization, spacing between child birth, proper maternal and child health and overall improvement of lifestyle. Information about the villages were collected from villagers by social mapping performed by themselves. Student’s t test was used to analyze the result.

Results:

128 children (CBR program) with visual disability were identified out of which 77.14% were blind and 22.86% had SVI. After adopting PRA project 84 new cases (p<0.05%) were detected of which 71.43% were blind and 28.57% had SVI. Main causes of blindness were cornea (31.28%), lens related (21.72%) and buphthalmos (17%). Immunization of child improved from 11% to 81% (p=0.011) over a period of one year. Common practices including food habit, spacing between child births improved. Vision of 9% blind child improved after intervention. 41% children are mobilized to blind school for rehabilitation.

Conclusions:

PRA like methodology is a new approach in community ophthalmology and is very promising to detect and rehabilitate visually impaired children. CBR method is effective in identifying blind child in the community however PRA is very useful to improve knowledge, to plan rehabilitation as well to treat underlining causes of childhood blindness.

Financial Disclosure:

NONE