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Act now: Professor Serge Resnikoff on making myopia a public health priority

Over the past decade, myopia has shifted from a common childhood inconvenience to what global health leaders now call a “public health emergency in slow motion” [1]. According to Professor Serge Resnikoff, former Head of Eye Health at the World...

Randomisation, confounding & observational methods in ophthalmic epidemiology

Randomisation and confounding Understanding the relationship between an exposure and an outcome of interest is the central challenge in ophthalmic epidemiology. The exposure may be aetiological, taking the form of a putative risk biological factor, or therapeutic, in the form...

South-South collaboration for the treatment of avoidable blindness in Botswana

This article describes the value of South-South collaboration in the reduction of avoidable blindness. Specifically it describes a South-South collaboration between India and Botswana that evolved out of the VISION 2020 LINK between Cambridge University Hospitals, two institutions in India...

The Global Vision Database

The overall goal of the Global Vision Database (GVD) [1] is to develop and deploy new and improved evidence on the prevalence of blindness and vision impairment (VI) globally. It is a repository which allows us to assess the causes...

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...

Insights on medical AI for ophthalmology: an update on current perspectives

Artificial intelligence (AI) has immense promise for revolutionising medical practice. Generative AI is a form of AI in which algorithms are trained on datasets that can be used to generate new content, such as text, images or video based on...

My experience of the transition into a specialist orthoptist role

Michelle Dent discusses the process of transitioning into a new role and the pros and cons along the way. An opportunity arose for a permanent, full time, band 7 specialist role in the medical retina (MR) team in the Newcastle...

Collaborating across the Caribbean to tackle diabetic retinopathy

The VISION 2020 LINKS Programme has been running since 2004, with a focus on improving the quality and quantity of eye care training in low-income countries [1]. In 2014, the Diabetic Retinopathy Network (DR-NET) was established [2]. This is a...

Strengthening capacity for ophthalmic research within three East African VISION 2020 LINKS – The Research Mentorship Workshop

Building capacity for ophthalmic research in low- and middle-income countries is an important aim of the VISION 2020 LINKS Programme. The International Centre for Eye Health (ICEH) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has been working...

Increasing access to eye care through community outreach clinics in Uganda

There has been a VISION 2020 LINK between Mulago Hospital and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and the Royal Free Hospital, London, since 2010. There have been regular training visits between teams from the eye departments at Mulago and the...