Happy Weekend Greetings to all and Happy new month, it is my hope and wish that the month of April brings us loads of love, loads of Blessings, and all the many good things we wish to have in our lives and for us to know no pain or sorrow this month. It is my birth month after all and i know it is going to be great today.

I hope you are doing well my dear reader and that time has been good to you, anyway the weekend is here and so you should do well to enjoy every last bit of it, don't forget to have fun in moderation though as too much of everything is "bad", i hope too much of money ain't bad though. haha.

Anyway, so i am mostly talking about eyecare and ocular health, this is my niche, this is one of the most important things that define me on the blockchain, because i am an Optometrist here in Ghana and my goal is to save sight wherever i go and wherever i find myself. However, for today we ain't going to pick a condition or pathology to discuss but rather we are going to look a little bit into the financing of your health when it comes to the eye, i hope you enjoy the read.

The eye care industry is still quite new within Ghana and in the African continent but within the time it got introduced till now i must say there has been lots of growth, lots of reforms and lots of sights saved and so i am proud to call myself and Optometrist and i am happy to be part of this success story.

In Ghana eyecare started in the late 90s and it became a big deal in the universities after the 20000s, although there are still some political and diplomatic issues departments have to face in integrating the program into the ministry of health, the private sector has done a great job in lifting the face of eyecare and i say kudos to all the eyecare team, from Ophthalmologist, Optometrist, to Ophthalmic nurses and Opticians.

Now in Ghana you should be able to find an eye clinic around you so long as you are not in an extreme remote area, the urban and periurban areas have eye facilities all around and almost every single month there is an organization or an eyecare group that does some free surgeries for people who could not afford to pay for surgeries like cataract, pterygium etc. In the government sector eye care is not expensive at all and with the aid of the national health insurance scheme you could literally walk in and get yourself checked out and not pay more than 10 or 20 cedis which is like 1 or 2 dollars.

Conditions like Glaucoma, an international headache, have some of their medications covered by the insurance completely whiles common conditions like dry eyes have their treatment or recommended drugs covered by the insurance. The cost starts to come in when people do not have the health insurance to reduce their cost though and so you may have to pay for getting yourself and hospital card, then you would have to pay for consultation, then any other services or test that may be done for you, etc.

It worsens when you have a refractive case and may need glasses. Well ideally, refractive error cases ain't covered in anyway by the insurance, unless you have a private insurance then that would be great for you because most of them have annual allocated revenue for their clients eyecare of which they have a package for their glasses that may be needed. Well it turns out that refractive errors are some of the most common diagnosis out there and i can speak from my experience in the hospital that if i should see about 20 patients in a day half of more than half of them would require some form of glasses.

Either to help them battle the sun, make night driving more comfortable and easier for them, or enable them to see well. So in the eyecare industry, lenses tend to be the main financial headache for patients especially those that may not be from an economically advantageous background and relies heavily on the National health Insurance to cover their hospital bills.

The other one would be cataract surgeries which ain't entirely free even though the insurance takes some part of the load, a patient may have to pay an equivalent of about 50 dollars to get this done for them and this is not a small amount that can easily be raised by the farmer in the village and so it makes cataract one of the leading causes of blindness because whiles it is easily treated, the people cannot afford it.

In the past years i had a team of friends from school you used the power of the blockchain to transform lives by helping to alleviate some of these financial burdens with respect to their sight. We provided free screening for them, provided some with free glasses and some with medication and things were on track to greatness before the covid hit. Anyway, that's just by the way, what i want to say is that, i believe that Hive through the DHF can impact more lives socially in terms of health too and this would not only be putting a smile on one's face but a light in one's eye. Maybe in the future @guiltyparties and @theycallmedan can help with such social impacts in Ghana. I would explain in my next post how sight implications can burden society and then we would get a proper understanding.

Before i end up writing too much and making the read boring, let me end here by encouraging each and every one of us to get our eyes checked as often as possible, do not assume whatever may be happening with you is normal or nothing to be perturbed about, here that from a professional first.

Google is not the way to go for your diagnosis, do not google your symptoms and say oh i am fine, you may be losing your vision without realizing and the most interesting thing about the eye is that a lot of conditions cause loss of sight without much of a symptom, atleast not one that may necessarily push you to go to the eye clinic. And so please, let's stay safe and do well to protect ourselves, remember that your eye is your light to this world. Peace!!!.