Category: news
Albertville students receive free health screenings
Free health screenings, Snead State nursing students Zach Moses, left, and Leigh Hargrove take first-grader Keigan Bryan's vital signs on Oct. 5 at Albertville Primary School.
More than 900 first- and second- graders at Albertville Primary School recently participated in the Sight Savers America KidCheck Program and comprehensive health screenings.
Screenings continue Tuesday and Wednesday at Albertville Elementary School, and Oct. 18-19 at Evans Elementary School.
The school-based health screening program provides head-to-toe health screenings for school children.
With parents’ permission, the screening included checking the students height, weight, BMI, vitals, vision, hearing, dental, nose, throat, chest and abdomen.
More than 40 nursing students from Snead State Community College and Jacksonville State University administered the free screenings.
Albertville Primary School Principal Vanessa Fowler believes the free health screenings for students are essential to their health and proper growth.
“Having the opportunity to give the students free screenings here at the school helps us catch health problems faster,” Fowler said. “This is a service to our children that they all need. If we can teach them at a young age to be healthy, it’s something that can stick with them. Right now, our focus is on being healthy and this also ties into our wellness program we are trying to get kicked off.”
Cindy Starkey, lead nurse for the Albertville City Schools, says the free health screenings will make a stop at every Albertville school except the high school.
“The health screenings are done yearly at our schools, but this is the first year we’ve been able to add the middle school,” Starkey said. “We were able to offer the screenings to the middle school this year because of the extra we’re getting from nursing students from Snead State and Jacksonville. This is a really great program to be a part of and it does help students understand about the wellness program.”
Starkey said the most common health problem they find among students is with their vision.
“Sometimes the parents don’t even know the student has vision problems. Problems with vision can cause a student to not be able to focus on work and could lead to headaches,” Starkey continued. “We are able to look at the students eyes here first.
“If we think they might need a full eye exam, we can get them a referral for an exam and possible eyeglasses. Our students are a part of this program because of the fact that healthy students make healthy learners.”
For more information about the Sight Savers America KidCheck Plus Program visit the website atwww.sightsaversamerica.org.
Category: news
KidCheck and Wallace State Nursing Students Team Up
To keep Alabama children healthy!
Category: news
Wallace State nursing students, faculty receive SSA KidCheck
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 (All day)
Wallace State nursing students and faculty received an update this week on the new Sight Savers America (SSA) KidCheck wireless technology system, aiding the college as it resumes free health-screening processes to more than 4,000 students at Blount County schools.
Wallace State’s Nursing Department and the Blount County Board of Education have provided free health screenings in Blount County Schools since 2001 with the support of Caring for Kids, Alabama Power Foundation and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Meanwhile, the new SSA KidCheck wireless system is provided through a $100,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation and will eliminate the need of the current paper screening and provide a more efficient delivery of important follow-up services for children failing vision and other SSA KidCheck screenings.
Category: news
Sight Savers America, Birmingham Children’s Theatre and Focus First set stage for free “Wee See” vision screenings
Press Conference: Thursday, September 22, 10:15 a.m.
Birmingham Children’s Theatre
2130 Richard Arrington, Jr. Blvd. N., Birmingham, AL 35203
Birmingham, AL — A visionary collaboration among Birmingham Children’s Theatre, Impact Alabama’s FocusFirst Initiative, and Sight Savers America begins offering free vision screenings to young attendees of “Wee Folks” series this fall. The program will allow children aged 2-5 years the opportunity to receive free, non-invasive vision screenings from FocusFirst staff after select performances. Follow-up examinations and treatment will be provided by Sight Savers America for all children found to have potential vision problems. This innovative partnership is largely supported by a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham.
Poor vision adversely affects tens of thousands of children in Alabama each year, leading to poor educational performance, behavioral problems, and low self esteem. Although these vision problems are most effectively detected and corrected during the preschool years, many preschoolers throughout the state do not receive adequate vision screenings due to the difficulty of comprehensively reaching such a large number of children and the inability of children to recognize their own vision problems. By providing free vision screenings after BCT’s live educational performances, the “Wee See” partnership will work toward a creative solution granting vision care to thousands of young children who would otherwise go without it.
FocusFirst, an initiative of the non-profit organization Impact Alabama, provides a cost-effective direct response to the vision care problems of children who live in urban and rural communities in Alabama. Since beginning service in 2004, over 2,100 colleges and universities throughout Alabama have participated with FocusFirst. These students have screened more than 123,000 children in all 67 counties across the state, with approximately 12% of the children failing the screenings and receiving free or subsidized follow-up care as necessary through Sight Savers America. Impact Alabama is housed at the University of Alabama Center for Ethics & Social Responsibility.
Birmingham Children’s Theatre, one of the nation’s oldest and largest professional theatre companies for young audiences, produces high-quality, professional theatrical entertainment and curriculum-relevant arts education experiences for children and families. Since 1947 BCT’s mission has been to educate, enrich, and entertain through the magic of professional theatre. In the 2010-2011 season, Birmingham Children’s Theatre offered 275 in-house performances as the resident professional theatre of the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex, and 161 tour performances, reaching 570 K-12 schools and serving over 163,000 youth and families.
Sight Savers America provides comprehensive eye care for over 40,000 children each year through a network of child referral agencies, medical providers, and other eye care professionals. This children’s eye care network provides vision screenings, eye exams, eyeglasses, medications, surgeries, low vision assessments, vision aids and other therapeutic vision treatments, in addition to coordinating transportation, medical insurance, and follow-up care.
For more information about the Wee See collaboration, please contact Stephen Black at 205-936-9963.
For more information regarding upcoming Wee See screening days, ticket sales, and group scheduling, please visit the Birmingham Children’s Theatre website at www.bct123.org, or call a Birmingham Children’s Theatre School Group Coordinator at 205-458-8181.
Category: news
Sight Savers America Awarded $100,000 Grant by Verizon Foundation
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Contact:
Linda Long, Director of Communications
(205) 540-7004
Sight Savers America Awarded $100,000 Grant by Verizon Foundation for its KidCheck, School-Based Rural Healthcare Program
Grant to Utilize Wireless Technology to Improve Health Screenings and Follow-Up Treatments for Alabama K-12 School Children
MONTGOMERY – The Sight Savers America, an Alabama-based nonprofit, received a $100,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation to expand the use of wireless technology for our award-winning KidCheck Program. Executives from the Verizon Foundation presented the check to the Sight Savers America KidCheck Program this morning at a news conference with Governor Robert Bentley, House Speaker Mike Hubbard, and Dr. Joe Morton, Alabama State School Superintendent.
Jeff Haddox, CEO of Sight Savers, said “This grant will be used to expand the wireless tracking method to at least ten school systems and to link the KidCheck health screening database in real time with the Sight Savers database.”
Jeff Mango, president – Georgia/Alabama Region of Verizon Wireless, said the grant has the potential to impact the lives of over 16,000 Alabama students, particularly in rural areas of Alabama.” “We see the exciting potential of technology to help address disparities in the access to quality healthcare in rural areas,” Mango said. “Verizon is proud to be able to help Sight Savers build on the initial success of KidCheck. Supporting programs that use technology to improve healthcare access is among Verizon’s top priorities.”
“In the past, KidCheck used a manual screening process leaving school nurses with the daunting task of going through a stack of paperwork, reaching out to parents and sending follow-up paperwork to Sight Savers and various healthcare providers,” Haddox said. “This often took months which slowed down the coordination of necessary follow-up care for the children.”
The Verizon Foundation grant will fund the hardware and software needed to make the KidCheck screening process completely paperless. It will utilize swipe card technology using laptops, netbook computers, and scanners. This grant will fund a central information repository so that data can be kept electronically. Additionally, the grant will fund the training of this new technology for participating college nursing school faculty and students who administer the KidCheck screenings.
To date, KidCheck has been implemented in 43 Alabama school systems in conjunction with over 20 Alabama two and four year college nursing schools. During KidCheck, a school gym is set up with 8-10 screening stations including height & weight, BMI, temperature, blood pressure, heart & respiratory rates, vision & dental screenings, along with eye, ears, nose, and throat exams. Sight Savers provides case managed follow-up care for children failing a KidCheck vision screening.
“Sight Savers intends to use this grant to take KidCheck to a whole new level and to build an unmatched healthcare network for children in need that will set the bar for other states,” Haddox said. “Verizon is making it possible for Alabama to lead the nation in preventative health screenings in our schools.” “Sight Savers has a proven track record of case managing vision follow-up and our ultimate goal for our KidCheck Program is to bring case managed follow-up to other important follow-up components and this grant is an important step in that direction.”
KidCheck became a department of Sight Savers America in February. KidCheck was initially launched by Governor Bob Riley in 2008 as a state program and was led by the Alabama Rural Action Commission with the strong support of the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) and the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH). The Sight Savers America KidCheck Program has continued strategic partnerships with Governor Robert Bentley’s Administration included various state agencies including ALSDE, ADPH, ALL Kids, Medicaid, and the Alabama Rural Development Office.
In 2009, KidCheck was named Alabama’s Most Innovative State Program by the Auburn University Montgomery (AUM) Center for Government. In 2011, the Business Council of Alabama (BCA) cited KidCheck as a measurable program that should be supported to in order to contain long-term healthcare costs.
Sight Savers is a Birmingham-based non-profit working in eight states and reaching approximately 250,000 students. Our organization coordinates all necessary follow-up eye care services from the State Vision Program that screens every kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade public school student in Alabama. Sight Savers unique case management protocol ensures that qualifying children receive free follow-up eye care treatment including eye glasses, vision aids and even necessary eye surgery.
For more information on the Sight Savers America KidCheck Program and today’s grant announcement with the Verizon Foundation, please contact Chad Nichols, Director of KidCheck, by calling (205) 991-4885 or by emailing cnichols@sightsaversamerica.org.
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