Healthy Eyes Healthy People ®: Increase the percentage of Missouri Kindergartners Having Eye Exams

Missouri's Childrens Eye Exam Law sunsets in 2012. With data collected from these kindergarten eye exams, we hope to make the law permanent. The success of the law and data collected could then be used by other states interested in similar law. This project will promote the importance of the eye exam directly to parents. This project will be distributing written messaging/educational pieces (white paper, patient or family brochure, etc.), promoting marketing messaging (radio, television, newspaper) and conducting live presentation/lecture. The targeted audiences of this project are African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Caucasians, Hispanics and Native Americans. The eye conditions that the project is focused are Amblyopia, Binocular Vision, Hyperopia and Myopia. This project aims to educate and encourage parents to have their child's vision examined by the optometrist or ophthalmologist of their choice. The project director will create educational brochures and create a new website/facebook page describing the difference between a routine school vision screening and a professional eye exam. The project director will also host educational seminars around the state for school nurses/parents/administrators about the children's eye exam law. Currently, Missouri doctors submit examination data to the Missouri Department of Health for these kindergarten eye exams. This project can easily monitor if more children are having eye examinations by the number of exam's data submitted. It is anticipated that the number of kindergarten eye exams will increase by 25% over the previous school year.