Community Optometrist’s Guide to Navigate Common Retinal Disease: From Detection to Monitoring

The course, in its entirety, is designed to provide participants’ comprehensive learning and hands-on experience on retinal diseases detection and decision-making on referral through a hybrid pedagogy of in-depth lecture and hands-on in-person workshops. The course consists of 4 components:
i) Understand different retinal diseases that affects vision, their pathogenesis, clinical signs and symptoms - a refresher. More emphasis on chronic retinal conditions such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
ii) Community optometrists’ role in detecting and referring DR and AMD.
iii) Understand the treatment strategies of DR and AMD and their complications.
iv) Community optometrists' role in co-managing DR and AMD patients from tertiary public health institution.

In the first component, via a lecture format, participants will gain insights on common retinal diseases that affects vision based on their aetiology, pathogenesis of the diseases and relevant clinical signs and symptoms.

In the second component, participants will gain knowledge and insights on how to achieve more accurate referral (i.e. avoiding over referral to tertiary) of DR and AMD as these are the two most common retinal diseases. The second component is a half-day workshop (at hospital setting).

In the third component, participants will gain rare and valuable insights on different treatment strategies for different stages of DR and AMD and their possible complications. The participants will also learn from collective perspectives of senior hospital optometrists on how to co-manage non-proliferative DR, treated DR with stable conditions and dry AMD and refer the preproliferative DR, Diabetic Macular Edema (DME) and wet AMD for treatment.

The fourth component is a separate half-day workshop at hospital setting. The workshop will cover a series of pre and post treatment conditions of DR and AMD and discuss which are needed to refer and which are not.

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