UCI Gavin Herbert Eye Institute Eyemobile

UCI Gavin Herbert Eye Institute is Orange County’s premier eye-care provider, offering state-of-the-art ophthalmic services, ranging from routine ophthalmic evaluations to complex medical management and surgical care. Our faculty of internationally recognized physicians, surgeons and scientists provide highly specialized training to future ophthalmologists, access to leading-edge clinical trials as well as sight-saving treatments and therapies for virtually any eye disorder.

Since 2015, the UCI Eye Mobile for Children has helped carry out this mission by providing life-changing optometric services for underserved children in Orange County while simultaneously building relationships with the community. The Eye Mobile for Children helps to ensure tha all children have the vision necessary to be successful in school and reach their full potential. Our goal is to ensure that all the approximately 100,000 preschool-age children in Orange County can see clearly.

The UCI Eye Mobile for Children is essential to overcoming the barriers to much-needed eye care services for the underserved children of Orange County. Recognizing the access barriers to receiving eye care, we provide all services free-of-charge, onsite at the schools, and in multiple languages. Racial and socioeconomic inequities in access to care are also evident across a variety of measures and studies. The economic cost of children’s vision disorders is significant, amounting to $10 billion annually in the United States. Families shoulder 45 percent of these costs—not including the value associated with a diminished quality of life.

The UCI Eye Mobile for Children, a 33-foot state-of-the-art pediatric mobile eye clinic, travels to public schools, Head Starts and community centers to care for children in underserved communities who lack access to comprehensive vision care. The Eye Mobile ensures that all children, regardless of their economic status, have the best vision to succeed in school. We provide vision screenings, comprehensive eye exams, prescription glasses, and education at no cost to families or schools.

The UCI Eye Mobile enables us to improve the quality of life for the tens of thousands of preschool-age children in Orange County who risk being left behind without proper vision care. Early vision screening is a crucial health initiative that helps to enable young children to grow and succeed. With our help, these children will have a significantly heightened chance to realize their full potential in school and life. Thanks to our interventions, many of these children are seeing clearly for the first time, and their lives are changing.

Preschool years are an important time for vision development in children because eye-brain connections are solidified during the first six years of life. Many preschool-age children will already manifest suboptimal visual acuity, and as many as one in four school-age children have a symptomatic vision disorder that may affect learning. Children with uncorrected blurry vision may experience impaired social development, learning difficulties in school, and permanent vision loss in the visual cortex, if a clear 20/20 image is not provided in early childhood. Thus, early detection and treatment of visual impairment and eye diseases is of paramount importance for our children.

Orange County