UCLA Preschool Vision Project Summary

The University of California Los Angeles preschool vision project has been performing free vision screenings for preschool age children for decades.  

One day, while I was spending time in the deep recesses of one of the offices which had been filled over the years with paperwork relating to vision screenings, one of the Team members walked in. It just so happened that the file box near me was labeled with the name of his elementary school. “Hey, I went there!” he said to me. We looked at the years on the box, back from the 1970s and found the one that would have corresponded to when he was there. With great excitement, we rifled through the various files, found his classroom end year, and actually picked out his exam from when he was a child.

Of course, with such a wonderful treasure trove of data comes any the important responsibility to learn from and educate about what had been done. Originally, these files were on paper, and later on computer. But even then, they were not designed to be facile for data manipulation and management. One previous project had detailed the results of the UPVP for a year, but I wanted to broaden that goal to include data for five years period over a summer, I painstakingly aggregated data files with different data types and locations into a cohesive repository that could be used for later research period the compendium of this work was a publication on five years of data with the UCLA preschool vision project. This is the largest data, and has and will help epidemiologists and pediatric ophthalmologist on focusing efforts in order to have the greatest impact to improve childhood vision.

These data were published at UCLA Health.