The future of data management for paediatric cataract

Cataract is a leading cause of blindness in children worldwide. Blindness can be treated with effective surgery, but in low-resource settings this treatment can be difficult to access. In addition, positive outcomes of the surgery are heavily dependent on comprehensive post-operative care.

To date in Nigeria and many other low-resource countries, robust electronic data-management systems that help facility teams to manage their patient data, especially when it comes to tracking children for follow-up visits after surgery, have either yet to be put into place or are in place but have yet to be refined to respond to the specific needs of eye care programmes. Sightsavers has worked with multiple state ministries in Nigeria to set up and test a system that responds to those needs. This commentary describes this work.