Psychosocial impact of vision impairment

Vision impairment impacts across a broad spectrum of daily life. The psychosocial impact has recently received much attention in contrast to the previous lack of appreciation of its importance by researchers and practitioners. The development of tools to better assess its impact on quality of life has increased our understanding of the importance and nature of the psychosocial impact. The availability of valid tools is critical to plan and implement appropriate care and to measure outcomes of service. Outcomes of low-vision care need to include a measure of changes in quality of life. The newly developed questionnaires allow evaluation of interventions. However, there is seemingly contradictory evidence on the effectiveness of low-vision services. When activities are measured such as the ability to see smaller objects and read smaller sized print, improvement related to low-vision care is evident. Follow-up from low-vision assessments have also demonstrated that most people use the low-vision devices prescribed. In addition to the ability to improve performance in selected activities, low-vision care must aim to maintain or improve quality of life for people with low vision. Some recent studies have failed to show that low-vision care is effective. This contradicts anecdotal evidence. This leaves us with two possible situations-either that low-vision care is not effective in improving quality of life or the more likely alternative is that some instruments may not be sensitive to the change that occurs. Future directions in our research are to better assess the need for low-vision care across cultures and lifestyles and to empirically assess the outcomes of different models of services.