| Liaoning province is located in northeast China, the number of visual disable person is about 310,000, and most of visual disable persons are living in the rural area. Traditionally the eye care service is strongly based on hospitals, although 80% of eye diseases can be effectively dealt with at primary health level. Because of exiting barriers such as distribution of service, logistics problem and less awareness, the large part of people living in the rural area in Liaoning province are difficult to access eye care services. In order to increase equality for all to access eye care services and meet the unmet need, it is important to use appropriate approaches to identify visual disable persons in the community, and provide cost-effectiveness services for the unmet needy in Liaoning province.
Mainly approaches for identifying eye diseases in the community include 1)Eye camps 2)Mobile units 3)Vision Centers 4) Community health workers 5) Key informants 6) Tele-ophthalmology. In Liaoning province, all of approaches mentioned above have been used. Currently the screening eye camp is the main approach to identify visual disable persons in communities in Liaoning province. With the support from governments and NGOs, community health workers and vision centers start to play more important roles in communities. In the future, key informants can be applied in Liaoning to identify childhood blindness, but tele-ophthalmology will not applied in other areas except Shenyang without technical and financial supports. Mobile units and surgical camps will gradually lose the value to identify visual disable persons in the community, when village doctors are encouraged to refer visual disable patients to nearby secondary eye units, and these units have capacities to do cataract surgery. |
