JEDDAH — Ebsar Foundation for rehabilitation and vision impairment services organized and hosted its 5-day 8th Low Vision Course in Jeddah this week. The course is accredited by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties for 28 hours in continuing medical education. World renowned eye specialists grouped together to share their research and developments in improving the care and treatment for the blind and partially blind. At the opening ceremony, Mohammed Tawfik Bellow, the founder of Ebsar, announced the launch of a new program for early detection of vision problems in children, called "Eye Spy 2020". This recently developed technology will make it easier to test the visual activity, depth perception, and color vision of children. This will be the first time that this patented, automated approach will be available in the entire region. Testing children with this new diagnostic tool can detect vision problems early on in children. If a proper treatment is applied when the problem is still in its earliest stages, it can stave off preventable childhood blindness. Ebsar Foundation is also working to enter into an agreement with the Ministry of Education to adopt this new diagnostic tool on a large scale to test schoolchildren in the Kingdom. “Attending this 5-day course are over 40 eye care professionals to enable them to provide coordinated care to adults and children who are visually impaired. In an effort to encourage the availability of this specialized care, Ebsar Foundation will provide 20 hours of voluntary medical services to all participants in this course, in addition to continuing medical education credits,” said Bellow, also secretary general of the foundation. The goal of such courses is to update ophthalmologists and optometrists on the latest technologies available to help protect and maintain whatever degree of vision that their patient still has retained and to enable the patient to function normally in his/her life with limited vision. “The implementation of wide scale diagnostic testing is necessary because 1 in every 20 preschool aged children and 1 in every 4 elementary level schoolchildren suffer from some degree of visual impairment, which if left untreated can develop into permanent, irreversible visual loss,” Bellow added.
