Lowawareness on early intervention for blind

CHENNAI: Dharshini, who suffers from peripheral vision loss due to glaucoma, was three-and-a-half-year old when her parents enrolled her in school. Till then she had never been outside home. And she had never interacted with peers of her age group, says her mother, Sudha, an Ambattur resident, who had little knowledge about her daughter’s condition.Dharshini was insecure, dependent on her mother for all her day-to day activities and was unable to identify shapes or sounds, a year ago. But, now the enthusiastic toddler, who is one of the seven students at the early intervention centre for the visually impaired run by the National Association for Blind (NAB) here, has learnt her first lessons in self-reliance.Four-and-a-half-year old Dharshini is now busy tinkering with the wooden toys laid out on the floor, to identify their shapes and texture in the company of her fellow classmates.“Awareness about the importance of early intervention programmes that focuses on preparing kids for mainstream schools is generally low,” says K Rajeshwari, a special educator at the NAB school who feels that the ideal age for early intervention is 0-1 years.Early intervention has played a crucial role for majority of the children in the school, who suffer from retinal detachment or genetic conditions like congenital ameurosis that lead to visual impairment, states Rajeshwari.It helps in training the child to understand concepts through Braille, to use canes to stabilise their mobility, sort objects based on texture and even use his/her residual vision, she adds. Three-year old Akshay, one of the students, who had retinal detachment in his right eye which inhibited his eyeball-movement, was trained to use the vision in the left eye effectively though visual-stimulation exercises.Commenting on awareness on early intervention, Sumita Agarkar, Deputy Director of Pediatric Ophthalmology, Medical Research Foundation of Shankara Nethralaya, says that while parents of children with visual impairment and multiple disabilities are able to identify problems with the child’s vision, parents of toddlers, who do not have problems with near vision fail to identify the problem.“In such cases, it is important for the pediatrician, who is the first point of contact for the parents to refer the child to us to seek appropriate intervention,” she says.   The lack of early intervention for a child diagnosed with visual impairment leads to unnecessary delay in concept development in the child, says ophthalmologist  Sachu Ramalingam.“The brain development in a child is directly proportional to the child’s physical milestones in the first year,” she says. “In case of a 4-6 month old child with visually impairment, there is no incidental learning because the child is unable to see and learn, hence the delay in expression of the motor skills will become stemmed if there is no intervention,” she explains.“When the child is aged above 2 years, the focus should be on enabling the child to enter mainstream by enrolling in regular pre-schools in the neighbourhood to ensure that child can enjoy normal interaction with the peer group,” she says.