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From Wills Eye Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (RAA, LJ, AVL); Eagles Youth Partnership, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (CL, SM-H, KD); St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (CL); and the Departments of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (SPC, BEL) and Ophthalmology (AVL), Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Supported by the Foerderer Fund and Eagles Youth Partnership.
Mr. Liotta, Ms. Martinez-Helfman, and Ms. Dennis are employees of Eagles Youth Partnership. The remaining authors have no financial or proprietary interest in the materials presented herein.
Introduction
Approximately 20% to 25% of American school-aged children have vision problems,1 which when left untreated may negatively affect school performance. A 2008 report by the Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY) entitled "A Problem We Don't See: The Status of Children's Vision Health in Philadelphiaâ[euro]* assessed vision care issues in Philadelphia public school children.2 Under Pennsylvania state law, school nurses are required to perform annual vision screening of all children. In 2007, more than 20,000 public school children failed their initial vision screening test, but 13,834 never received follow-up care.2 These rates have remained relatively stable in subsequent years (unpublished data, PCCY).
Since 1996, the National Football League Philadelphia Eagles Youth Partnership Eye Mobile program has worked to make vision care accessible to underinsured Philadelphia children. The Eagles Eye Mobile (EEM) program was created specifically to target children who fail school nurse screenings and would not likely have access to eye care. The EEM visits schools in low-income areas, providing children who have failed school screening with optometric examinations to identify correctable refractive error, prescription and delivery of two pairs of glasses, and arrangement of chaperoned busing during school hours to university health science center-based pediatric ophthalmology consultation at no cost to families. Based on the PCCY data, the program reduces the proportion of children who did not receive care after failing a school nurse screening from 63% to approximately 48% by seeing approximately 3,200 children per year.
Our goal was to assess the EEM program's ability to achieve its objective of rendering eye care to socioeconomically high-risk children. We assessed the rates at which school nurse vision screening was correctly able to identify children needing vision care, rates of successful glasses wear after prescription by the EEM optometrist, and...