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- Vision and Eye Health in Population Health
- Access and Coverage
- Children’s Vision and Eye Health
- Chronic Disease and Vision Health
- Aging with Vision and Eye Health
- Low Vision
- Coalition Letters and Statements
A child’s vision, which fully develops and changes throughout childhood, requires consistent evaluation, referral to eye care, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up to care to ensure vision problems are caught and treated before progressing to unnecessary permanent vision loss. Early detection and intervention for vision disorders in children are part of national goals and health care standards; yet, there is no federal support for a national-level children’s vision and eye health initiative that coordinates and promotes best practice models for vision screening, referrals to eye care, and follow-up to eye care treatment or professional development. Accountability for addressing children’s vision and eye health are also absent from many programs that address other aspects of children’s health and development, including children’s hearing or oral health – meaning, there is little to no impetus to address it or coordinate action to improve it.
At the state level, significant disparities exist in children’s vision and eye health outcomes and access to eye care across the United States. State laws to address children’s vision and eye health vary widely in approaches and often lack protocols for referrals to eye care providers, documentation to ensure eye care was received, or support to address barriers in access to eye care. States may also lack the necessary resources to adequately capture data on rates of received eye care, which leaves a lack of information as to why eye care was not received thus leading to challenges in addressing existing disparities among demographic sub-populations or in rural or under-resourced communities.
Thus, without a strong public health system in place, a child’s vision problem may go undetected, undiagnosed, and untreated, leaving them vulnerable to deficits in development, academics, and potential vision loss that follows them into adulthood.
The EDVI Act will establish state and community-based EDVI programs across the United States to address children’s vision and eye health. The goal of the EDVI Act is to ensure that every child with a possible vision problem is identified and connected to appropriate eye care, to support early childhood professionals, health care providers, and families with updated and evidence-based vision screening methods and established referrals to care, and implement follow-up protocols to ensure that children who need eye care treatment receive it before a vision problem leads to potential vision loss.
The EDVI Act models the bipartisan success of the Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) program that has drastically increased the rates screening and referral to care for infants with hearing loss since 1999. The EDVI program would be the first national-level program established to specifically address children’s vision and eye health in the United States.
Like the EHDI program, the EDVI Act will provide states and communities with grant funding to improve, update, and modernize state and community approaches to children’s vision and eye health and integrate it into ongoing programs and systems of care that already address other aspects of children’s physical, behavioral, and sensory health in places such as early learning or school- and community-based health settings. The EDVI Act also allows for technical assistance for states and communities to access evidence-based guidelines to address children’s vision and eye health while also making resources available to the public.
The EDVI Act also fosters collaboration between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Education to ensure that children’s vision and eye health is integrated into ongoing programs and interventions where children’s vision and eye health has a natural fit (such as in school-based health initiatives like Head Start and others) and to foster research efforts at the National Eye Institute.