A Study on Awareness of Primary School Teachers Regarding Refractive Errors and its Early Identification among Primary School Children

Background: Children form one of the major age groups requiring attention to refractive errors because of the high prevalence of myopia, hypermetropia and astigmatism. Visual problems in children are important because of their impact on the child's development, education, future work opportunities and quality of life. School age children constitute a particularly vulnerable group where uncorrected refractive errors may have a dramatic impact on learning capability and educational potential.

Methods: The descriptive survey approach was adopted. The population consisted of primary school teachers in Mysore. Convenient sampling was used to obtain the sample of 60 primary school teachers in selected schools of Mysore. The data was collected using structured questionnaire to assess the awareness of primary school teachers regarding refractive errors and its early identification among primary school children.

Results: Majority of primary school teachers (60%) were in the age group of less than 30 years and majority (91.67%) were females. 33.33% of them had their educational qualification as B Sc B. Ed. 71.67% of them had less than 10 years of experience. None of them had previous experience of identification of visual problems in children. Majority (80%) of primary school teachers had adequate awareness regarding refractive errors in children, but none of them had previous experience of identifying visual problems in school children.

Conclusion: Childhood visual impairment due to refractive errors is a significant problem among school children and has a considerable impact on public health. Early detection of the refractive errors is very much important to prevent blindness and other complications. Therefore the knowledge regarding the refractive errors among school teachers is very much important to detect any manifestations of refractive errors in school children. Hence the researcher selected this study to find the knowledge of school teachers regarding refractive errors and also to provide additional information to them which will be helpful in detecting early manifestations of refractive errors in school children.