Diabetes leads to a host of serious health complications. One of them is blindness, and today the KHMH along with the UK led Vision 2020 Links program held an awareness training on diabetes retinopathy. The training was for physicians and doctors to be able recognize when a person with diabetes is going blind, to able to properly check, diagnose and treat or refer the patient. We found out more about the training.
Ellen Heinemann - Program Coord., Vision 2020 Links
"Its actually initiated by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK and we link various hospitals from low income countries to UK links. So, to special hospitals, our hospitals predominantly, that they can support the links in each of the individual countries. So, we run these workshops in different countries, in South Africa and the Caribbean predominantly and we normally bring the relevant link. For this one is the link in Brighton and Sussex hospital that we've brought with us on this workshop because they are linked to the Belize country and it will take our workshop through the country and make sure that we spread the message of how important it is to prevent diabetes in general."
Donovan Cacho - Health Planner, Ministry of Health
"This is basically to improve the number of referrals to BCVI or it could be a private entity to have your eyes screened because we have a lot of people who are diabetic but they are never looking at the eyes and that's what we are trying to do with our health care providers. It's very important to check the eyes because we think that we are actually seeing, we may not know that we are going blind and because every day, yes, we could see when we wake up but the eyes it's not something you would see physically, it would sneak up on you. So, it would come slow, one day you would wake up, you are seeing and eventually you would have a blood clot in the eyes etc., and go blind immediately and this does happen to young people. We have seen people in their 30's, 40's they have kids, they are working and going blind."
A diabetes specialist from the UK was also brought in to discuss how diabetes affects the limbs and what doctors should look out for to treat these patients before they lose their limbs. Health officials encourages diabetes patients to get their annual eye screening and overall health check up.
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