World sight day: A veritable avenue for vision screening towards attaining the goals of VISION 2020 in Nigeria

Background: World sight day is marked yearly and provides the opportunity to create awareness about eye health. The global event can also serve as an avenue to appraise impacts of health promotions and interventions on blindness prevention. Aim: To determine the prevalence of blindness and common ocular conditions among the studied population. Materials and methods: It was a cross-sectional study involving workers at Uyo Mechanic Village and University of Uyo Teaching Hospital. Instrument was developed in line with study’s objectives. Subjects’ responses to questionnaires and ocular assessment formed the core of data generated which was analyzed by Statistical Package for Social Sciences (version 20.0) Observation: A total of 121 males and 280 females with a ratio of 1:2.3 were analyzed. Age range was from 18 years to 66 years with a mean of 39.8+9.2 years. Prevalence of blindness was 1%. Intraocular pressure, indicated in 81 subjects, ranged from 11 to 33 mmHg with a mean of 16.2+4.8 mmHg. Absolute glaucoma was recorded in 5 patients (1.2%), 71 patients (17.7%) were glaucoma suspects and 19 patients (4.7%) had glaucoma. Refractive error 167 (41.6%) was the commonest finding. Statistical analysis of data revealed no significant relationship between sex and diagnoses (p value = 7.967, X2= 0.826, 95% CI = 0.821-0.836) or age and diagnoses (p value = 509.522, X2= 0.601, 95% CI = 0.591-0.510). Conclusion: Refractive errors were the commonest ocular finding in the population studied.