YAKIMA, Wash.- The Welch Allyn Spot Vision Screener can detect eye diseases without touching the patient at all. The new medical device was bought by the Yakima Neighborhood Health Services in collaboration with the Pacific Power Foundation.
According to Doctor Chad Douglas at Yakima Neighborhood Health, the Welch Allyn Spot Vision Screener is used during well-child visit appointments to check young children’s vision for problems. He says a lot of patients, especially in younger age groups, do not know their letters or recognize shapes, and the device can bypass that. The vision screener checks a child’s eyes as they watch the screen light up and play music for them, at the same time it checks for eye diseases like lazy eye, nearsightedness, or farsightedness. The results will tell if the patient needs to be referred to an optometrist or an ophthalmologist.
“In children who do have problems with their eyesight, certain conditions if it’s not caught early can lead to lifelong problems of vision, and our goal is to catch it as early as possible so that we can try to correct it before it becomes a lifelong problem,” said Douglas.
Dr. Douglas added that taking children to all of their well-child visits and not skipping any, is essential to catch things early in terms of vision.
