Over 700 children from communities in the Wa West District have benefitted from a free eye screening by Corporate Club Ghana (CCG) based in Wa in collaboration with Bliss Eye Care, a private eye care clinic in the Upper West Region, with a call on parents to pay attention to the eyes of their wards and perform regular check-up for them.
The children were drawn from communities such as Siiru, Balawa, Dandafuri, Kangba and surrounding communities in the district.
A member of the club, Mr Gordon Bob-Milliar, told the Ghanaian Times that the objective of the exercise was to help address visual challenges among young children in basic schools to enable them to study with ease.
He indicated that the exercise was to help detect common eye conditions for early intervention, and said the group sought to empower and support needy children in less-privileged communities across the region.
“We are young men and women who come together to make impact in our communities; we have the younger generation at heart which is why we are organising this programme to help detect problems in the eye for early treatment”, he said.
He encouraged parents to pay critical attention to their wards’ eyes and to also seek early treatment if they detected any abnormality, to avert serious problems in future.
Speaking to the media after the exercise, Dr Zakarea Al-Hassan Balure, an Optometrist and Manager of Bliss Eye Care said the screening revealed that some children had conjunctivitis, allergies, glaucoma, and refractive errors, among others.
Dr Balure said drugs and eye glasses were also provided for children who had conditions such as cataract, refractive errors, glaucoma and allergic conjunctivitis.
The Chief of Siiru, Naa Yakubu Issa, expressed gratitude to the club and Bliss Eye Care for the initiative which he said would go a long way to help children in the respective communities.
He appealed to benevolent bodies to organise more of such health exercises in the district.
The collaboration with Bliss Eye Care was under a project dubbed, “Blissful Sight for Kids (BS4Ks)” funded by Ghana Vision in Switzerland.
The club also provided free sanitary pads to about 150 adolescent girls at the screening.
Corporate Club Ghana is a group of young persons within the working class category of the region who have decided to network and also contribute resources to undertake basic humanitarian services for vulnerable communities in the region.
FROM RAFIA ABDUL RAZAK, WA
