Primary School Vision Screening

Since 2009 final year BSc Optometry undergraduates from DIT have been carrying out vision screening for primary school pupils in the ten national schools in Dublin 8. Groups of four graduates attend the schools with one qualified supervisor and in a two hour session approximately 24 to 30 pupils would be screened. Children who fail the screening are given a letter to take to their parents asking them to bring their child into DIT’s on-campus optometry clinic – the National Optometry Centre.

All primary school pupils have their vision screened by a public health nurse at ages 7 and 11 but a failure in this screening means that the child gets referred to a hospital (in Dublin 8 this is Our Lady’s hospital for sick children). The wait time between failing the nurse’s screening and an appointment in Our Lady’s hospital is 18 months. The wait time between the optometry undergraduates’ screenings and an appointment in a paediatric student clinic in the National Optometry Centre is no longer than a month. The undergraduates write a reflection on their experience at the end of the project and to date these reflections have shown the enormous enthusiasm for the project and an increased awareness of the inequities in the Irish healthcare system.