Bukoba Referral hospital conducts cataract surgeries

KAGERA: TANZANIANS have been urged to make regular eye health checks as reports indicate that cataract is on the rise.

An eye specialist from the Bukoba Regional Referral Hospital, Dr Daniel Mashamba told the ‘Daily News’ in an interview that cataract is the leading cause of visual impairment in adults, and is the overall leading cause of blindness worldwide.

“Vision loss can affect people of all ages. However, most people with vision impairment and blindness are over the age of 50 years. About 10 out of 100 persons (especially adults) suffer from cataract. Poor vision due to cataract leads to reduced vision-related quality of life. Consequently, patients fail to participate in daily social and economic activities,” he said.

Elaborating, he said a team of eye specialists from the Bukoba Regional Referral hospital (BRRH) in collaboration with surgeons from the Kilimanjaro Centre for Community of Ophthalmology (KCCO), recently conducted a mobile clinic in Muleba District leading to eye cataract operations to 33 patients.

“We are very grateful to President Samia Suluhu Hassan for allocating a big budget to the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the support from Kilimanjaro Centre for Community of Ophthalmology (KCCO), which enabled us to make a mobile clinic to Nshamba and Kimeya Health Centres in Muleba District,” he said.

He explained that during the mobile clinic patients with eye problems were advised to report to the Bukoba Regional Referral hospital (BRRH), where the cataract surgeries were conducted free of charge.

According to Dr Mashamba, as the population ages, there is an increase in backloading of cataract and hence there is a need to increase cataract surgical uptake and parallelly make the services easily available over the whole country.

“Since the good outcome of cataract surgery was associated with good quality of life, monitoring of surgical outcomes of cataract should be made regularly and routinely. This will help to identify and address any shortcomings related to visual outcome to improve the quality of cataract surgery and hence the quality of life of patients undergoing cataract surgery,” he said.

Ms Daivestina Swiya (72), a resident of Muleba District’s Nshamba village is among patients who undergo eye cataract operation. She strongly believes that eye care services can help improve equity within society.

“In the health sector, there is still a great need for eye specialist. The mobile clinics have been of great assistance. They should not end only in towns but instead reach the villages where many people are in need of getting services. If the mobile clinics reach the rural health centres, then a lot of people will get health care services,” she said.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the leading causes of vision impairment and blindness at a global level are refractive errors and cataracts. Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment. In at least 1 billion of these, vision impairment could have been prevented or is yet to be addressed.

It is estimated that globally, only 36 per cent of people with a distance vision impairment due to refractive error and only 17pc of people with vision impairment due to cataracts have received access to an appropriate intervention.

Vision impairment poses an enormous global financial burden, with the annual global cost of productivity estimated to be 411 billion US dollars (WHO).