Editorial
Rural eye patients' plight
Ophthalmologists' service should be made available
While addressing the 40th annual conference of the Opthalmological Society of Bangladesh, prime minister Sheikh Hasina drew the attention of ophthalmologists to the plight of eye patients in the rural areas. She urged them to extend their service to them by visiting villages.
As the major public and private hospitals are concentrated mostly in the urban centres, the larger section of the population is unable to access and afford their service. Of the many diseases rural people suffer from, eye-related conditions, especially cataract, is common.
Due to lack of timely diagnosis and treatment, cataract, which is removable through operation, has become a cause of blindness.
Most of the poor rural people either remain unaware of the nature of their eye condition, or cannot simply bear the cost of seeing an eye specialist in hospitals or clinics away from home. As an alternative, they go to quacks or faith-healers for treatment. Needless to say, their condition only gets worse.
The importance of this particular aspect of public health cannot be overemphasised. But this is also not the only occasion that the PM reminded doctors employed in public hospitals, in the upazila health complexes in particular, to be attentive to rural patients. But we have not yet seen any significant improvement in that area. We are yet to know how many doctors have returned to the rural areas in service of suffering humanity.
We hope ophthalmologists she addressed at their annual conference would be driven by their oath and conscience to attend to the eye patients suffering in villages.
Exhortations apart, the government needs to develop the communications and other infrastructural facilities including adequately equipping the rural health complexes for doctors to stay in villages for a reasonable period to attend to patients.
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