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Specialist high-street eye clinics for managing patients with retinal disorders can enhance care standards

The author examines the successful introduction of community-based retinal clinic services by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Dr Sajjad Mahmood, Consultant Ophthalmologist, MREH, shares experience of establishing community-based medical retina clinic services. Sight loss from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), cataract,...

Advances in the understanding, diagnostic and treatment of keratoconus

*Joint first authors Keratoconus is a bilateral and asymmetric eye condition in which the cornea’s structure is affected and thinned, causing a cone-shaped bulge to develop. This results in progressive loss of vision and impairs the ability of the eye...

Quality matters in the management of serious eye disorders

The author discusses the first quality standard for serious eye disorders from NICE and takes a look at new care models for enhanced service delivery. Patient backlogs pose risks to patient safety, with research showing that people are losing sight...

Eye research: where next?

Eye research in the UK is underfunded relative to other areas of medical research and general awareness of sight loss and its prevention remains poor, messages that were reinforced in presentations and discussions during a recent research summit meeting in...

Optic nerve swelling – your survival guide (part 1)

Assessment of optic nerve appearance and functions is a daily routine in neuro-ophthalmology. Following a recent high profile court case there has been a significant increase in the amount of referral to ophthalmology departments to assess the optic nerve and...

#KnowYourDrops: breaking down barriers to poor compliance

Award-winning* #KnowYourDrops eye drop compliance campaign helps patients for World Glaucoma Week to achieve medicines optimisation in ophthalmology. The #KnowYourDrops campaign is fast becoming an internationally recognised model to help support healthcare professionals, with the provision of better tailored ophthalmic...

25 years of OCT

David Huang first described optical coherence tomography (OCT) in 1991, in his seminal paper on the subject in Science. This method developed the work of others on ophthalmic interferometry, which essentially showed that measuring reflected light could be used to...

Pathophysiology of diabetic macular oedema: why combination therapy may be better

The prevalence of diabetes has continued to increase over the years. It is currently estimated that there are 382 million with diabetes worldwide in 2013, and that this figure is expected to rise to 592 million by 2035 [1]. In...

A paradigm shift in the way we approach cataract surgery

Cataract surgery is the most common elective surgical procedure in the UK [1], with in the region of 350,000 cases being conducted each year. With an ageing population, this figure will only continue to rise over time. Cataract surgery is...

Therapy for limbal stem cell deficiency: cell fate after limbal stem cell transplants

“The beauty of scientific research lies in that the search for answers often yields yet more questions.” A large body of evidence points to the corneoscleral limbal location as the repository of putative epithelial stem cells [1]. Thoft proposed the...

Designing ophthalmology services Part 2: How do we address the queues for a clinic?

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...