Prof Carrie MacEwen. Scope for optimising capacity within the Hospital Eye Service (HES)? The demand for ophthalmic care continues to grow with no increase in capacity. In order to be able to continue to deliver adequate care ophthalmologists have devised...
Are we doing enough to meet the current demands on ophthalmic services? In part one of a two-part series (see Part 2 here), Rosalind Harrison takes a look at how efficiency has been improved in eyecare services in the US....
In 2004 a network of three ophthalmic reading centres in Belfast, London and Liverpool (known as NetwORC UK) was established to form the largest reading centre in Europe for the purpose of providing high quality grading of ophthalmic images for...
In this article we describe a new local service development, the ‘Complex Biometry Clinic’ at Leicester Royal Infirmary. Retrospective data analysis of patients referred between October 2012 and October 2013 was performed. The aim was to provide a one-stop service...
SpaMedica in Newcastle-under-Lyme has been awarded the highest possible rating following a recent inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and social care in England.
The first of this three-part series showed how systems engineering can be used to correctly diagnose and address the causes of delays in a clinic. This second article describes how to design a more productive system that meets the new...
Cortical blindness is a rare but recognised entity. Cerebrovascular accident is a well-known risk factor. We report a case of an 84-year-old lady with bilateral cortical blindness with multiple cardiovascular risk factors. Case report An 84-year-old lady was admitted under...
*Equally contributing co-first authors. Case report A 45-year-old man presented to his local optometrist with a three-week history of severe intermittent left eye pain with associated blurred vision and tenderness around his left temple. Two days prior, he developed weakness...
Simerdip Kaur takes a look at the latest ophthalmology-related news stories and asks which are based on facts and which are ‘fake news’. Headline: Doctor prints cornea on demand! Dr Hideo Kodama from the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute first...
With the current global pandemic of COVID-19 we have all had to redesign and reorganise our normal working practices. Non-urgent hospital work has been postponed to allow redistribution of resources, redeployment of hospital staff and to reduce the risk of...
For the second reflection in this series (see Patient One here), Professor Jonathan Rees recounts his experiences of the last patient he saw as a medical registrar, telling the tragic story of a young man’s death and the risks that...
You’ve made into ophthalmic specialist training and before you know it, it’s your first on-call shift. You are expected to provide the specialist on-call service out of hours and there is a new wave of responsibility, with, let’s be honest,...