The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (MORMONS) is to establish an eye centre at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi.

Richard Darko, Ashanti Regional Director of Public Affairs of the Church who disclosed this on Saturday, said the decision to open the eye centre followed an eye screening exercise undertaken by the Church in Kumasi last year.

At a media encounter with the leadership of the Church, Mr Darko said all the equipment used during the exercise by the medical team of the Church who came from the United States of America were left behind in readiness for the opening of the centre.

The encounter was a follow up to the one, held last two years to brief the media on the mission of the Church and what it had been able to achieve in the area of building bridges between it and the communities.

Within this period, Darko said, the Church had distributed a full container load of books worth about 42 million cedis to some schools in Ashanti. The Church, he said, also presented 15 boxes of medical kits worth about 15,000 dollars to the School of Medical Sciences (SMS) of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

Darko said the Church, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health organised a training workshop for selected medical personnel and Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) drawn from Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Northern, Upper East and West regions on maternal and child-birth in Kumasi.

He named the church's three mission statements were focused on proclaiming the gospel, perfecting the Saints and redeeming the dead and said it was the belief of the church that those who had come to Jesus should be retained for Jesus and not allowed to return to their old ways.