Eye clinic set for the road

A travelling eye-health clinic should be on the road by March next year for a three-month stint servicing areas including Port Hedland and Newman.

The 14.5m semitrailer, which is being built in Brisbane with $4 million in State Government funding, is aimed at providing outreach services in ophthalmology in WA.

The truck is the result of work by the Aboriginal Health Council of WA and the Lions Eye Institute.

Lions Outback Vision project manager Terri Leverty said the truck, which was an initiative of project director Angus Turner, would complement the current services being supplied.

Ms Leverty said the truck was important because services had become harder to deliver due to a lack of access to some of the high-tech machinery and equipment in the regions needed to perform the work.

“We were sending a lot of people to Perth, ” she said.

“So now we’re putting the machinery on a semitrailer and doing it around WA.

“Albeit there’ll still be cases where people will need to go to Perth.”

The truck will require up to 10 staff to facilitate the biannual trips and Ms Leverty said she hoped the program would increase the amount of people the service was seeing.

Lions Outback Vision diabetic eye health co-ordinator Alex Ramirez visits about five sites a month to conduct eye-health checks and provide training and development for rural clinic staff.

He said the new service would enhance the delivery of services in the region and improve eye health.

“It will be very interesting to see how the delivery of a mobile eye-health unit has an impact, ” he said.

The truck will offer comprehensive optometry and ophthalmology care for conditions including cataracts, refractive error, trachoma, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy.

The eye-health clinic will travel to 16 centres including Katanning, Albany, Broome, Esperance, Karratha, Kalgoorlie, Leonora, Fitzroy Crossing and Derby, travelling about 25,000km a year.