All citizens can now benefit from Govt.’s eye testing voucher – Minister Anthony

Feb 27, 2026 News

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(Kaieteur News) – Citizens can now benefit from eye testing and spectacles vouchers from the government, Minister of Health Dr. Frank Anthony announced on Thursday.

The announcement was made during the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with over 60 Voucher Programme Service Providers at the Herdmanston Lodge Hotel.

When the eye testing voucher was introduced in 2024, only children 18 years and under and adults 50 years and above were eligible.

“What we want to do is ensure that we open it up now for anyone who requires an eye test, would be able to get that eye test and if, when you test their eyes, if they need a spectacle, then you will also have access to the $15,000. So, I think it will now widen to everybody in the population and so I think that would be a positive thing,” he said on Thursday.

All citizens will be benefiting from a $2,000 voucher for eye testing and a $15,000 voucher for spectacles.

The minister disclosed that since the start of the eye testing voucher programme, 175, 272 eyes tests were completed and over 160,000 spectacles were issued. Of the number tested, 1200 persons were diagnosed with cataract and treated accordingly.

“We also saw some people who had glaucoma, and again, we were able to offer them different treatments. We have from the stats seen using the adult vouchers, we have in our population, quite a number of persons who are diabetics, and we believe that in the eye testing, if we can expand that to look at people to see if they have changes, especially if they’re diabetic patients, then that would be extremely helpful… If you have a patient that is diabetic, had diabetes for a number of years, then it would be quite helpful to see what’s going on in the back of the eyes, and for us to also get those results, it helps us with our programme, because this is not just a transactional relationship. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do here is to help the patient,” he said.

In addition to the Eye Testing & Spectacles Vouchers, there is the Cervical Cancer Screening Voucher which is valued at $8,000, and the Universal Health Vouchers which is available for children and adults which is valued at $10,000.

These vouchers can be uplifted from health centres across the country.

Dr. Anthony said that 13, 112 laboratory tests were conducted on children while 91, 501 were done on adults via the Universal Health Vouchers.

In terms of HPV screening for the two years, the ministry was able to conduct 20,853.

The minister stated that when his ministry started to offer the HPV vaccines, they were targeting four strains of the virus. “But when we look at the data that we’ve collected from these 20,000 tests that we’ve done, we recognize that it’s not just this 16th strain and the 18th strain that we’re seeing in Guyana. In fact, if they’re 38 oncogenic strains, we are seeing quite a lot of them in Guyana,” he explained.

He added that from the 20,000 women who took the HPV test, they have seen about 19% positivity rates among those that have been tested.

With these data, the minister urges providers to continue to sensitize and encourage women to take up the test, because if left untreated over time, it can convert to become cervical cancer.

“So, we want to work with our population to help to prevent this, and that’s where we want to enlist your help. Those of you who are operating labs and have been working with this programme with us, we want to see how we can extend that service so that we can get more women into this programme. 20,000 people is not enough, so I’m hoping that by the end of the year, at a minimum, we should say we have about 40,000 people who have benefited from this programme. But for us to do that, we need your help,” he told healthcare providers.

Another trend he highlighted was that from the 91,000 adults using the voucher, 64% of them are women, which means the men hardly utilized the vouchers.

Dr. Anthony said the reality poses a “big problem” and hopes to see a change going forward. He noted that one of the tests on the voucher is the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test which helps detect potential prostate issues.

Minister Anthony shared that since the launch of the Voucher Programme, health authorities have been able to understand what is going on with the population, how they can bring them into care and work with them.

“So, these vouchers are very important, and the results that we run and the things that we do behind the scenes are very important, which means getting the data is extremely important for the ministry, because from the data we’re able to run these analyses and reach out to people, and then we can stratify it by locality, by region, by sex, by types of diseases, all those things and it helped us to do our work better. So, we really want you to help us to extend this so that more people can benefit from what we are doing,” he said on Thursday.

While noting the initiative has been a success since its inception, he said there are still areas of challenges, and that is access for persons living in the interior regions. “As we move forward this year, we want to ensure that we get all of you to work with us to do some outreaches into non-traditional areas of operation. So, if you’re operating on your coastland, we want you to go out and operate in some of these (interior) areas as well,” he told providers.

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• Dr. Frank Anthony, eye testing, spectacles vouchers, Voucher

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