Bridge helps with safety glasses, but why is vision important?

Vision became part of the evolutionary chain over 500 million years ago. Given the amount of time it took to fine tune your vision, Bridge Safety Vision wants to make sure your eyes stay safe. The environment we live in has changed immensely over the centuries, so vision's benefits have evolved.  There are several reasons your sight is worth protecting.

Situational Awareness

The ears and eyes are the most important sensory organs for gaining situational awareness: the knowledge of what's happening around you as you move around your world. We still use our vision to contextualize threats, but these days, that involves more than just lions and avalanches. Situational awareness helps us to connect with our greater community. Dr Mica Endsley defined three primary components of this assessment:
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• Detecting cues
• Understanding those cues
• Projecting how those cues are likely to change in the near future.

Humans might not have psychic powers, but our subconscious minds can churn information long before we move it into our conscious thoughts. That information arrives as a gut feeling that warns us of dangers. The human eye can process 36,000 pieces of information every hour. It focuses on 50 different things every second, so our situational awareness is more evolved than you might think.
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Gut instincts evolved to protect us from sharp teeth and claws, and today, it continues to defend us from other threats. Your eyes support your career, family life, and parenting skills. They also prevent accidents, so those humble safety glasses you wear at work every day protect every aspect of your day-to-day life.

Quality of Life

​Vision is more than just a base survival strategy. It offers independence, mobility, and even entertainment. For that reason, it's a massive contributor to quality of life. The slightest vision loss can interfere with educational attainment and mental health cognition, so a sighted person has a better chance at happiness.

Glaucoma and other peripheral vision losses have been found to have a significant effect on quality of life. QOL scores take a sharp turn for the worst in the later stages of vision loss when utility ratings begin to decline. ​

Financial Survival

​Vision loss is expensive. It requires tools and services to support social and professional function, so its direct economic burden amounts to$14 billion a year. Beyond direct costs like caregiving and healthcare, visual disorders rack up an economic burden of $139 billion a year. These numbers matter, particularly if you're an employer whose team is exposed to vision threats. Sight loss causes billions of dollars in lost productivity every year. and that's before you account for the money businesses pay out in the form of work-related damages.

Independence

Your vision supports almost every activity you participate in on an average day. Your eyes support your shopping, driving, and eating habits. They make it possible for you to cook, care for children, and socialize. They help you to read, recognize faces, and repair appliances, but vision loss has less obvious effects. Visually impaired people struggle to:
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• Sustain walking speeds.
• Negotiate crowds and stairwells: Even mild visual field deficits are associated with falls.
• Avoid osteopathic fractures: People without cataracts have a 5% lower risk of fractures.
• Maintain a high standard of living: Mild binocular visual field loss is connected to employment opportunity barriers and reduced salaries.

Swift, precise action is often all it takes to achieve your greatest professional goals. Your eyes don't just make you more responsive. They also increase the amount of information available to you. For the visually impaired, independence comes at a premium. It's difficult to buy groceries and feed your toddler when you lack the depth perception required to engage with the world around you. Freedom is a luxury that comes easiest to the able-bodied, and dependence is the price you pay for its absence.  

Mental Health

A loss of independence can have dire effects on your mental state. Disability reduces your capacity to enjoy a positive exchange with your social environment, so it damages your relationships and removes social opportunities. Restricted participation comes with restricted networking abilities and the career growth they foster. That sets off a domino effect that fuels isolation.

​That's one of several reasons that vision impairment is associated with loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders. Forty-three per cent of low vision patients have depressive symptoms. The social harms of vision impairment are massive, often leading to social withdrawal and reduced self-esteem.

It's easier than you think to run a program for employee safety glasses. Walmart and Bridge Safety Vision have joined hands to make this investment as easy as possible. In the United States, the average compensation for work-based eye injuries has risen to $301, 000, so eye protection is more than just ethically sound. It makes financial sense, as well. Treat your employees' eyes with the respect they deserve by investing in safety glasses.

Bridge's program allows your staff to fill their prescriptions correctly at their closest retailer. Our signup takes 10 minutes and allows you to run a comprehensive program without struggling over administrative details. When it comes to the price of safety glasses, Walmart is hard to beat, so we'll keep your expenses as low as possible.

Understanding and perception work together to turn data into a big-picture view of the world around you. Your eyes might be a small part of your comprehension, without them, the world darkens on both a literal and figurative level. Don't leave your staff in the dark. Choose Bridge.