On April 8, Oregon Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation (OLSHF), a Trust grantee, is partnering with the William Temple House for Eye-A-Palooza, an event that is expected to provide 100 clients with free vision screenings, prescription lenses and frames. Eye-A-Palooza is part of OLSHF’s Mobile Health Screening Program (MHSP), which gives adults in need access to exams and eyeglasses. The Trust recently awarded OLSHF a grant for mobile screening vehicles to expand programs like Eye-A-Palooza.
More about MHSP from their website:
The goal of the Mobile Health Screening Program (MHSP) is to detect sight and hearing problems before they become serious. MHSP has two primary objectives: conduct over 600 annual on-site health screenings for a minimum of 150,000 children and provide follow-up referrals for low-cost services to those with health problems.
Working in partnership with local Lions Clubs, school nurses and school districts, MHSP also collaborates with local health professionals and community organizations to conduct screening events statewide in Oregon.
During program year, 2015-16 we achieved the following:
- Vision screening: 172,000 children screened at 550 schools; 10% referral rate.
- Hearing screening: 19,000 children screened at 100 schools; 9% referral rate.
- MHSP can now screen at multiple different locations during the same day thanks to increased regional staff (13) throughout the state and an inventory of 35 Spot photo screening devices.
- Distributed follow-up information for low-cost healthcare services to those children we referred including other OLSHF services – Patient Care, Lions Eyeglass Assistance Program – KEX Kids Fund, Mission Cataract, Low Vision Clinic and Hearing Aid Bank.
OLSHF has accomplished this by successfully scheduling and coordinating each event with school nurses and district staff as well as Lions Clubs. MHSP staff around the state collaborate with Lions Clubs to promote the events, secure the needed volunteers for screenings, announce the events in the media of the local community, document the events, track recipient statistics and create reports for nurses/schools. We trained hundreds of parents, school nurses, nursing students and community volunteers to use the digital Spot vision screener under the guidance of MHSP staff.
If you are interested in learning more about our program or even volunteering at an upcoming event, please contact Program Administrator Kaitlin at 503-413-7632 or Kaitlin@OLSHF.org.
