Research
Cost Effectiveness and Budget Impact Analysis of Delivering Vision Screening and Refractive Error Correction through Integrated School-Based Health Programmes in Ghana and Cambodia
The School Health Integrated Programming (SHIP) project was developed to demonstrate how schools can be an effective platform to deliver integrated health interventions, using deworming and vision screening as examples.
The 5-year national program for Ghana and Cambodia would result in vision screening of 5.4 million schoolchildren in Cambodia and 9 million in Ghana. Teachers were also examined in both countries and received spectacles for presbyopia.
There is a lack of quality evidence on the cost of school-based vision screening programs in Low-to Middle-income countries.
Results confirm that vision screening of schoolchildren as part of a school-based health package is a cost-effective way to identify and provide spectacles to children with URE.
Integrating vision screening with other school-based interventions identified in the essential package of school age child health and delivering it at scale can maximize economies of scale and scope, ultimately reducing the unit cost of individual school-based interventions such as vision screening.