Visionaries

Alabama’s Sight Savers America is on a mission to spread the gift of sight to the nation’s disadvantaged children.

No less an authority than Dr. Lanning B. Kline, chairman of the Eyesight Foundation of Alabama and a UAB Department of Ophthalmology professor, refers to Jeff Haddox as a “visionary.” Haddox, founder and CEO of Sight Savers America, is determined that every child in Alabama have access to affordable vision treatment. Haddox had told Kline of his dream to one day dispatch a mobile vision-testing lab throughout the poverty-plagued Black Belt region of central Alabama to conduct one-day eye examination clinics for underserved children who have little or no access to eyecare. Kline was initially skeptical, assuming that many families would not follow through on addressing a child’s poor eyesight due to financial constraints or a lack of vision specialists in the region. He soon learned that Haddox planned a more comprehensive solution. “Haddox was closing the loop by not only providing the eye exams but also free eyeglasses at the same time. His staff would then follow up every year to make sure the children were getting the care they need,” Kline wrote in the UAB Department of Ophthalmology newsletter Vision.

Originally established as Sight Savers of Alabama, the Pelham-based nonprofit organization served 11 children in 1997, their first year of operation. In 2008, the group branched into Mississippi, prompting the name change to Sight Savers America. In 2010, the organization will serve 30,000 children in Alabama as well as 5,000 in Mississippi, with a staff of 22 case workers. Their staff totals 30, with an additional 350 volunteers.

Before he started Sight Savers, Haddox studied eye diseases. “I had worked for over 20 years doing eye research through grants from the National Eye Institute,” Haddox says. “I realized that poor vision was adversely affecting tens of thousands of children in our state each year. This was largely the result of poor public awareness about the importance of eye care in young children and the inability of children to recognize and articulate their vision needs.”

According to Haddox, many parents are unaware that children should see an eye doctor by age four; some vision problems can be corrected if they are addressed at an early age. Sight Savers offers children from low-income families the opportunity for corrective eyecare. “If they’re low income, then those children are sent to doctors who are in our network, who will give free examinations and a free pair of glasses,” Haddox explains. “If we aren’t able to find a free eye exam or a free pair of glasses, then we pay for it. That happens about 15 percent of the time. We have over 400 optometrists and ophthalmologists in the state of Alabama on our network, and many of them give us a few free eye exams a month. We might have to send a doctor four patients one month, so we would pay for the fourth one.” (The organization is funded by the State of Alabama and private donations.)

Sight Savers began a partnership with the Alabama Department of Education in 2003, implementing the first program in the state dedicated to comprehensive follow-up of individual children with vision problems. Those in kindergarten, second, and fourth grades are vision-screened through the public schools. Each visually impaired student is assigned a Sight Savers case worker who schedules eyecare appointments, makes reminder phone calls, and arranges transportation, if needed. Each case is then added to a database, allowing Sight Savers America and the state to track students’ vision problems and accompanying treatment.

Haddox has also found that many parents of legally blind children are not aware of the current vision technology available. “Children who are legally blind can actually see, but their vision is very, very poor. They might be standing in a room and be looking at two or three people, and they can see that there are people there, but they can’t necessarily distinguish whether they’re male or female, or which person is which. We identify these children (whose families can’t afford expensive vision aids) and we purchase assistive technology for them. That can be anything from a hand-held magnifier to a closed-circuit magnifier called a CCTV. That machine is the gold standard for what we do.”

A CCTV is a device that includes a monitor with either a hand-held camera or camera mounted above a viewing area that allows an object, photo, or page from a book to be magnified up to 75 times. The machines cost as much as $2,500. “The CCTVs really change these children’s lives, from not being able to read any kind of print to being able to put any book or magazine under the camera,” Haddox says. “A girl putting her make-up on can point the camera at her face and she can apply her own make-up for the first time. Or to see a child who takes that device and points it at their mother and sees the details of their mother’s face that they usually can’t. One little girl put her puppy under there, she’d never seen his face.” &

For additional details, visit www.sightsaversofalabama.org. Donations are also accepted via links at the site.