Introduction:

Although there are global initiatives aimed at improving visual health in populations and at achieving greater social inclusion of people affected with vision loss, important barriers coexist such as poor accessibility and equity of healthcare services and economic and gender-related differences that prevent obtaining better indicators.

Objective:

To establish the association between the social determinants of health and visual disease in a community of coffee harvesters in the department of Caldas, Colombia.

Methods:

Descriptive and correlational study with the participation of 1,387 coffee harvesters. The information was collected at the time of optometric assessment. A questionnaire was applied to explore the structural and intermediate social determinants of health and data related to visual health. The association between the variables was established through the chi-square test.

Results:

The average age was 57 years ± 10.7 years, 77.3% were men, 97.2% belonged to the low socioeconomic stratum and 73% had completed elementary school. The most frequent visual diseases were refractive disorders, account ting for 85.7%; and the main diagnosis was presbyopia, with a prevalence of 75.8% (95% CI: 73.5%; 78.03%). The bivariate analysis showed a statistically significant association (p<0.05) between the diagnosis of optometry and the structural and intermediate social determinants of health: sex, marital status, age group, educational level, socioeconomic status, and occupation.

Conclusions:

Visual disease in coffee harvesters is influenced by structural and intermediate social determinants of health, modifiable with intersector and cross-sector actions such as educational level, socioeconomic stratum, and occupation, which must be incorporated into public policies to improve their quality of life and to reduce preventable blindness.

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