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Low vision is defined as a vision loss that is severe enough to impede an individual ability to learn or perform usual tasks of daily life, given that individual level of maturity and cultural environment, but still allows some functionally useful visual discrimination. Low vision cannot be corrected to normal by regular eyeglasses or contact lenses and covers a range from mild to severe vision loss but excludes full loss of functional vision. The majority of persons who are legally blind are included within the category of low vision.
GOALS OF LOW VISION CARE
Low vision care is a coordinated and collaborative system of discrete services designed to maximize independence and quality of life for individuals with low vision. Services may include vision evaluation and eye care, provision of assistive devices, instruction to promote the use of vision or alternative sensory strategies in life tasks, training to promote safe and efficient travel, and psychosocial services for individuals with low vision and their families.
Low vision care professionals promote strategies that will maximize effective use of vision in tasks that both promote independent functioning and are deemed to be important by each person with low vision and his or her family. For example, a recent high school graduate with low vision may want to find employment in the computer industry. Both the graduate and the team of professionals must work together along with the graduate family to identify and implement realistic steps to reach this goal. It is essential that service providers, consumers, and their families understand and agree upon the steps toward reaching this goal and work together to achieve it.
Goals of Professionals
To understand the goal of low vision care from the vantage point of service providers, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the distinctions among visual impairment, activity limitation, and participation restriction in order to see how health, education, rehabilitative, and social services fit conceptually into the broad picture of comprehensive low vision care.
1. Visual impairment results from problems in body function or structure such as a significant deviation or loss.
2. A difficulty in performing activities of daily life due to a visual impairment is classified as an activity limitation.
3. An activity limitation becomes a participation restriction when the inability to perform a specific activity creates problems for an individual in becoming involved in broader life situations.
Based on these definitions, comprehensive low vision care has been conceptualized as any treatment or assistance to individuals with low vision that prevents their visual impairment from becoming an activity limitation or a participation restriction. Low vision care includes
4 Restoring function by enhancing impaired vision that is, through medical and optometric intervention.
5 Teaching strategies to compensate for impaired vision.
6 Accessing a full range of education/rehabilitation supports and services.
According to these definitions, when it is not possible to prevent impairments from becoming activity limitations or participation restrictions solely through restoration of function by medical or optometric interventions, health care, education and rehabilitation practitioners are mobilized to teach compensatory strategies or along with social service professionals to provide a full range of educational and rehabilitative support and services.
Zola Mathe is the writer and a researcher on health topics for more information go to
http://www.allwiseinformation.com/All_Lasik_Eye_Surgery_Information.html
Article Source: UnArchived Articles
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