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What’s new in wet AMD papers?

Paper presentations on neovascular (‘wet’) age-related macular degeneration (AMD) from the 16th European Society of Retina Specialists Congress, Copenhagen, September 2016, outline recent research directions evaluating the impact of vision loss on key health domains, patient preferences in the process...

100 years of insulin

*Joint first authors The centenary of the discovery of insulin is a time to celebrate one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century. Background Before 1923, Type 1 diabetes mellitus [T1DM] resulted in death from severe ketoacidosis...

Embracing assistive technology in the fight against sight loss

The author shares his own experience of sight loss and explains the vital role assistive technology can play in the lives of visually impaired patients. There is no doubt that sight loss continues to be a clear and present danger,...

Broadening of treatment options for potentially blinding retinal conditions

Rod McNeil provides an update on a promising bispecific antibody recently approved for treatment of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) and diabetic macular oedema (DMO) and considers emerging developments in biosimilars to established anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) therapies, including...

Novel changes during COVID-19 – transforming a walk-in Eye Casualty to a telephone triage service

With the current pandemic climate due to COVID-19, out of the norm approaches have been adopted in different hospitals across the UK to ensure patient safety. At our Eye Casualty (EC) department at Northampton General Hospital (NGH), we felt the...

Deliberate darkness: The systematic weaponisation of blinding in global protests

As eyecare professionals, we spend our entire professional lives fighting to preserve light. We train to master the delicate microscopic topography of the cornea, the retina and the optic nerve, all with the objective of saving our patients from the...

Ambitions for sustainable service recovery amidst an escalating post-COVID backlog

Rod McNeil reviews plans, activity and solutions to better address the post-COVID backlog and bolster sustainable service recovery. Ophthalmology was the busiest outpatient specialty during the three years to March 2020 across the English NHS and again recorded the highest...

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...