Visually impaired need holistic care

The challenge in meeting the needs of visually impaired children over the next 20 years is to develop holistic care, according to an Irish expert.
Prof Jonathan Jackson from the Department of Ophthalmology at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast said Ireland was in a good position to tackle their needs.

He said better strategies had to be developed for doing eye tests with children who did not communicate well. Agencies and professionals needed to work together more, children sent to mainstream schools had to be supported better in the classroom, and support was also needed for families coping with visual impairment.
“We need to maximise each child’s ability and encourage them to use their residual vision to best effect. It is rarely appropriate to deal with vision-impaired children as if they had no vision whatsoever,” said Prof Jackson.
He was speaking at the seventh European Conference of the International Council for the Education of the Visually Impaired hosted at Trinity College this week. Almost 700 children in the Republic are registered as vision impaired. That means their vision is 10 times worse than normal and they would not be able to read the biggest letter on the chart in an opticians. “Apart from those on the registry, there are twice as many who are vision impaired who choose not to be registered, or do not quite make the mark,” said Prof Jackson.