Training health workers to identify trachoma
Pakistan’s healthcare system has a unique asset: its legion of female healthcare professionals, known as Lady Health Workers.
Currently, around 100,000 female healthcare workers work in rural regions and deprived urban areas across the country. They are often the first level of health care in their local community, where they are involved in services such as immunization, prenatal and postnatal care, and family planning.
They also played a key role in the fight against trachoma. In recent years, Sightsavers has helped train more than 1,700 healthcare workers and their supervisors to identify people with symptoms of the disease.
In Pakistan, social barriers mean that some women cannot be visited by male health workers, making the role of female health workers even more essential. They were able to access homes, examine women and children, and refer them for treatment when necessary.
Additionally, we worked with Pakistan’s health department to train eight surgeons to operate on patients with trachomatous trichiasis. This is the advanced form of trachoma, in which a person’s eyelids have begun to turn inward so that the eyelashes painfully scratch the surface of the eye.
The surgeons we trained were able to perform operations to correct this painful condition on 127 patients, including 88 women.
