Community Participation in Eye Health Care Education in The Upper West Region

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to determine whether rural communities in the Upper West Region participated in eye health care education programmes. The study was in two phases. In the first phase, 200 people from selected cluster communities were interviewed. These selected communities were chosen using the simple random sampling technique. After this, purposeful sampling technique was used to select eight community members from each of the twenty-five local communities. The aim was to find out from the local community members whether they participated in eye health care education programmes, and how they helped in combating blindness and eye problems in general in their local communities. From the study, it came out that the rural communities did participate in some of the activities such as taking part in the decision-making and availing themselves for voluntary eye health care work. However, they could not participate fully due to abject poverty, inadequate methodology used in educating them on eye health care issues, inadequate capacity building techniques on the part of the facilitators, and de-motivation among others. The study recommended some ways by which rural communities could participate effectively in eye health care education programmes irrespective of their socio-economic status.