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RNIB unveils Eye Care Support Pathway to transform eyecare support for patients

More than 100 people came together recently to back a new patient-centred approach to eyecare support. Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) which has taken the lead on this work, hosted an event at Aston University in Birmingham on...

Lifelong braille user pays tribute to “excellent” writing system

Sight loss charity RNIB Scotland is celebrating 200 years of braille, the revolutionary writing system for blind and partially sighted people. Developed by Louis Braille in 1824, it uses raised dots to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and abbreviations. Braille has...

Millions of patients benefitting from improved care as new NHS IT software rolled out

Innovative IT software designed to tackle waiting lists and reduce discharge delays has been rolled out across more than two thirds of the NHS. The NHS Federated Data Platform securely brings together data currently held in separate systems, making it...

Communication in ophthalmological surgery: Perspectives from an observer

"Please don’t move” is a common phrase I have heard whilst shadowing in theatres as the ophthalmologist contends with the eye of a patient looking around and tilting their head during surgery. As the average corneal diameter is approximately 12–12.5mm...

Corneal transplantation in the United Kingdom: are we blind to the challenges that still exist after the Organ Donation Bill?

Corneal transplantation (CT) is a significant treatment option for a huge number of patients in the United Kingdom (UK) [1]. For an individual, CT results in a substantial improvement in quality of life. Penetrating keratoplasty with full thickness grafting has...

Charity work in Cambodia: Culture, cataracts, and cruelty

Cambodia has one of the lowest numbers of eye specialist doctors per capita in the world, and Bita Manzouri takes us on a journey into the charitable work of the Khmer Sight Foundation who are working to combat this. “Ut...

Ophthalmology in Bangladesh

Imaging Specialist Hayley Coates steps outside her comfort zone to experience ophthalmology in a resource-poor setting. As one of the most densely populated countries in the world, Bangladesh also has one of the highest rates of preventable blindness, worldwide. It...

An ophthalmology elective in the South Pacific

For the four weeks of September 2024, I was lucky enough to embark on an ophthalmology elective in the Kingdom of Tonga, a small island nation in the South Pacific Ocean. The Tongan people are incredibly friendly and upbeat, and...

Acetylcholine receptor antibodies in the diagnosis of ocular myasthenia gravis at the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is the commonest autoimmune condition to affect the neuromuscular junction. In the UK, its prevalence is 15 per 10,000 [1,2] and recent studies have shown that rates are steadily increasing [3,4]. Aims of this audit The aim...

White dot syndromes

It is fair to say that trainees and consultants who are not medical retina specialists are a bit scared of the so called retinal ‘white dot syndromes’. It is easy to understand why this is the case, as almost every...

The 2020 Milgram Experiment

Will ophthalmology recover from COVID-19? Learning Curve columnist Gwyn Samuel Williams shares his thoughts on the developing impact of the pandemic “It’s busy today,” the nurse in green chuckles. “There are six patients I think.” Six. This clinic is designed...

Non-organic visual loss

Patients can present to eye departments with various signs and symptoms (mostly symptoms) with no obvious organic cause. These patients can be labelled with any of a wide range of diagnoses such as functional visual loss, functional overlay, psychosomatic reaction...