Wednesday 30TH August – Part 3

Finally we visited the Jinja Ophthalmological Clinical Officer (OCO) training school, led by the legendary Dr Binta. He gave us a great presentation marred only by a terrific thunderstorm which blew in the windows and half the building. A chunk of this went in my eye – at least I was in the right place!

The school has trained 161 OCOs over a number of years, and of these only 12 are no longer in practice. 3 have left the country, 1 became visually impaired and couldn’t continue, and the rest have died. This is a pretty good record. All OCOs are registered nurses with at least 2 years of experience, and the course lasts a year. Apparently it is getting harder to recruit people, and they have now started to offer courses for Ophthalmological Assistants, who are less qualified and the course lasts 3 months. We met a number of OCOs trained by Dr Binta in the hospitals we visited, and they were all extremely complimentary about the training.

The training included information on refraction and low vision. One issue was over cadres – at the moment there were no low vision cadres in government, and there was also confusion over refractionists / optomotrists. Another issue was that the government was keen that at least 60% of students should be private and fee paying. At present there were next to none, and it was clear that Dr Binta preferred it that way.

Dr Binta is clearly a highly respected man who had achieved a great deal for sustainable eyecare in Uganda.

We travelled back to Kampala – not quite such a beautiful place as the source of the Nile.