School eye screening survey in the Gaza Strip/Palestine

Abstract

Aim: To estimate prevalence of vision impairment and associated refractive error in basic school children in the Gaza Strip in the State of Palestine. The study will also provide an estimate of the use of corrective spectacles among children with refractive error. Associated factors like age, sex, type of school, residence, parents’ education, parents’ occupation, other indicators of socio‐economic status and vision problems in the child and the family will be studied.Methods: This is the first comprehensive study of school children vision impairment in the Gaza Strip.The method is an adaptation of WHO's Assessment of the prevalence of visual impairment attributable to refractive error or other causes in school children (RESC) methodology.Study population are students in the first and the nineth grades from public and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools in the Gaza Strip.The sampling unit (cluster) was classes in the target grade levels and the strata were grade (grade 1 and grade 9), type of school (public and UNRWA) and school gender (all male, all female and co‐ed schools).Based on an expected prevalence of blindness of 20% among target population, 95% confidence level, 20% non‐response rate (refusals and absent students/total number of students), 3.4% margin of error and a design effect of 1.35 to account for clustering, a sample size 1100 students was determined. 28 classes were selected with probability proportionate to size from a list of classes of target grades along with number of children enrolled within each class in public and UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip.Results: The actual number of students was 1094 in 15 UNRWA and 13 public schools (15 first grade classes and 13 ninth grade classes). The total non‐response rate was 12%.Data collection was completed on 18.5.2023. I did not have time to clean and analyse the data. Results will be presented at the conference.Conclusions: Conclusions will be presented at the conference.