Page 156 - DISINVESTMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF VISION SCREENING TESTS BASED ON THEIR EFFECTIVENESS

CHAPTER 8
course, 21 (68%) of whom screened children From the rural areas nurses from 34 out of 75 communes (45%) followed the course. Nurses from 18 communes (24%) went on to screen children. From a total of 118 rural family doctors’ nurses, 51 (43%) followed the course. Nurses who followed the course were from communes with larger numbers of eligible children than nurses who did not follow the course (on average 87, as compared to 37).
Children were screened by 26 rural nurses (51% of the nurses who followed the course and 22% of all rural family doctors’ nurses). The fact that less than half the rural nurses, representing less than half the rural communes, followed the course, put screening in rural areas at a disadvantage before screening even started.
Analysis of the screening data after six months of screening showed that coverage in rural areas was very low in comparison to the cities: children had been screened in only 15 out of 75 communes and only 0.28x the average birth rate had been screened in the rural areas, as compared to 1.19x in Cluj-Napoca and 1.43x in the small cities. According to the interviews with the family doctors’ nurses, the main problem with screening at the doctors’ offices was that parents would not bring their children for screening, even when invited repeatedly. Therefore, in August 2018 the nurses were
Figure 2: nurses who followed the course (left columns), doctors who followed the course (middle columns) and eligible children x100 (right columns; two birth years).
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