Barriers to cataract surgeries as perceived by visually disabled 50 years and older cataract blind participants of Nepal survey for Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Purpose To identify the main barriers and determinants to cataract surgery as perceived by 50 years and older Nepali people with severe visual impairment & blind due to cataracts. Methods This was part of the Rapid Assessment for Avoidable Blindness (RAAB), held in all provinces of Nepal from 2018 to 2021. Cataract blindness was defined as a person having the best-corrected vision, <6/60 in the better eye, and an unoperated cataract, which was the principal cause of visual disability. The participants were interviewed using a pretested questionnaire with seven known barriers. The demographic information was correlated with the barrier score. Results We surveyed 718 cataract blinds. Two-thirds of the participants were females. Four in ten were aged 50 to 59 years. The main barriers perceived were ’need is not felt’ (237; 33%), cost associated with surgery (218; 30%), lack of access (93; 13%), fear of surgery (88; 12%), nobody to accompany (40; 6%), unaware of surgery (18; 3%), and treatment denied (24; 3%). The barriers were not significantly different in females than in males. (P = 0.85). The provincial variations of barriers were significant. (P <0.001). High cost was a perceived barrier in all provinces except Gandaki. Access to treatment was a barrier in the Gandaki province (38%). One in four participants in the Madhesh and Bagmati provinces feared surgery. Nearly half of the cataract blind in the Madhesh and Lumbini province did not feel ‘need for restoring vision’. Conclusions To improve cataract surgery uptake, identified barriers, like lack of awareness, low visual need, and high cost must be addressed. The strategies could be devised according to provincial barriers but similar to both genders and all 50 years and older cataract blind. Offering low-cost cataract surgery, financial assistance and health promotion to improve awareness and remove fear were recommended.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".