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Rural Eye Program
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health@cherokee.org
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Application Unavailable
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Vision care is provided for patients of the Cherokee Rural Health Network through a cooperative agreement between the Cherokee Nation Health Service, and the NSU College of Optometry.
Optometry students in their fourth year residency, under the clinical direction on NSUCO practitioners/professors provide exams in operatories at Hastings and Claremore hospital and at the rural health centers in Sallisaw, Salina, Stilwell and Jay. An excellent example of inter-agency collaboration, services from this arrangement originated at Hastings Hospital on Tahlequah where the regional Oklahoma university is also based.
The emphasis of the Rural Eye Program is to detect and treat vision problems common to Native Americans such as the complications resulting from diabetes and glaucoma. Optometry is the only doctoral degree offered at NSU, and was a logical development in the university curricula due to specific needs of the Cherokee population served at Hastings for vision related diagnostics. Addition of a Mobile Eye Clinic to the inter-agency arrangement in 1989 extended services to more remote areas of the tribal jurisdictional service area when the Kellogg Foundation funded purchase of the unit. Operated by the tribe and staffed by NSUCO, the Mobile Eye Clinic made it possible for elderly patients of the Cherokee Nation without transportation to receive vision care through the Indian Health Service system in their communities for the first time. A series of upgrades to the rural health clinics has since established permanent operatories for vision screening in all but two of the service sites.
A further point of interest regarding the Northeastern State University College of Optometry is that it is located in the former W.W. Hastings Hospital building at the old "Deer Park" site on the north end of the Tahlequah campus. This site was an extension of the grounds of the Cherokee Female Seminary, the first institution of higher learning built to educate women west of the Mississippi River. The building remains the centerpiece for the modern NSU campus.
For more information on optometry services, call the clinic or hospital directly.
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