Primary eye care services provided at the primary health facilities: Evidence from Cross River State, Nigeria

Background: The provision of primary eye care services at primary health facilities is essential for the elimination of avoidable blindness by 2020.

Objective: This descriptive study examines the current resources and services available for eye patients at the primary health centres in Cross River State Nigeria.

Methods: Pre tested semi - structured questionnaires were administered on 146 randomly selected primary health care workers from 12 selected primary health facilities across the 3 health zones in Cross River State. Participant and non - participant observation of the facilities were done. This research got full ethical approval from the Cross River State Ministry of Health Research Ethics Committee. Data were analysed using IBM SPSS version 20 software.

Results: The results revealed that 136(93.2%) of the 146 primary health care workers were female, most 85(58.2%) were community health extension workers, while 19(13%) were nurses. Only 8 (5.5%) of the workers had training on primary eye care, while 14(9.6%) of them said they provide basic ophthalmic services like visual acuity assessment and pen torch examination. Referral of eye cases were popular but were done by ‘word of mouth’ without records and follow up. Health education talks although routinely done, lacked appropriate vision promotion content.

Conclusions: The primary health centres were not adequately staffed and equipped to provide primary eye care services and as such requires considerable improvement in terms of enabling policy on primary eye care integration, adequate training of existing human resources and provision of equipment for primary eye care services.