KEY POINTS:
When Cindy Summerfield asked her son's school whether the 9-year-old boy might have poor eyesight, she was told not to worry _ it was "a boys' thing".
"We were told by the school that he was being naughty and disruptive. It was a boys' thing," she says.
Most parents would have left it at that. But Mrs Summerfield happened to be helping in the classroom one day and noticed that her son Paul, now a 13-year-old at Westlake Boys High School, couldn't read certain colours on the board.
"The teacher's whiteboard marker ran out and she picked up another one, and Paul went and sat by the board and he couldn't see it," she says.
"I questioned it and quickly discovered it was a colour issue. He was telling us he was having headaches. They thought he hadn't been drinking enough _ no one said he's having headaches because of eye problems."
The Summerfields took Paul to an optometrist and found that he needed glasses.
Three years later they had the same experience with their second son Shaun, now 10.
"It really frustrated us because we had been quite proactive, asking how the boys were doing in the classroom. We were told, `It's just a boys' thing'," Mrs Summerfield says.
Two new studies have found that many other New Zealand children with eyesight problems are not being picked up, despite a screening programme which is supposed to check all children at ages 3 or 4 in preschools and at ages 5 and 11 in schools.
A survey of all 4800 Year 10 students in the Waikato District Health Board area between July 2006 and June last year has found that 6.3 per cent of the students had vision problems that had not been picked up.
A further 14 per cent, mostly with glasses, had been referred to optometrists or other professionals, making a total of 20 per cent who had vision problems by 14 or 15 years old.
The study's lead author, Dr Lesley Frederikson, said the figures were "unexpectedly high" and meant the screening system was missing many children.
"Primary eye health just doesn't seem to be a high priority for the Government," she said.
"They can count up how many cataract operations they do, but not how many kids have problems."
The second study, published this week by a charity-funded project called See Here, has found that oversight and training of technicians running the national vision and hearing screening programme have collapsed since the National Audiology Centre was disbanded by the Auckland District Health Board in October 2006.
"No regional data has been collected since this time, screener practice has not been monitored and there has been no training for new technicians," the study says.
It finds that referral rates from preschool screening to optometrists and public hospitals vary between health boards by orders of magnitude, from 1.5 per cent in the lowest district to 19.4 per cent in the highest.
"Differences are almost certainly the result of different screening practices across the country rather than true differences in prevalence," it says.
It also finds that children referred to eye clinics at public hospitals sometimes have to wait more than a year for an appointment, forcing most parents to pay for private optometrists.
The study recommends restoring oversight and training for the screening programme, providing free vision assessments for all children under 18 and reviewing the subsidy for glasses, which is now limited to families with community service cards or high health user cards. The Ministry of Health's chief adviser on child and youth health, Dr Pat Tuohy, said the ministry accepted many of the study's conclusions and was negotiating a new contract with a district health board for training screening technicians.
The ministry is also appointing a clinical advisory group to have oversight of the Well Child preschool health programme, including the new B4 School health checks which will include eyesight and hearing tests.
ON THE WEB
www.seehere.org.nz
