Moorfields marks World Sight Day 2014

“No more avoidable blindness” is the theme for this year’s World Sight Day on Thursday 9 October and Moorfields is holding and participating in a series of events to focus awareness on blindness and visual impairment  and what can be done to prevent it.Events include a diabetic retinopathy screening conference, the unveiling of a new tactile artwork collection, health promotion sessions and a music recital.

Our reading centre, which grades images of the eye to identify disease and its progression and develops novel research methods, is marking the 10th anniversary of its annual diabetic retinopathy screening meeting with their biggest World Sight Day event to date.

Topics to be covered by guest speakers at the meeting include current issues in screening, the experience of a new grading centre in Bangladesh, and three different experiences of multi-disciplinary team working. There will also be an opportunity to find out more about innovations such as the portable eye examination kit (PEEK) technology, which uses an adapted iPhone to take images of the back of the eye in remote communities, which are then sent on to reading centres. National charity the RNIB will talk about strategies for promoting diabetic retinopathy screening, and the ‘popular choice’ talk is diabetes care: past, present, future.

The diabetic retinopathy screening meeting will be held on Thursday 9 October at UCL’s Senate House in Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. For more details about the event and the speakers, or to register, please visit http://www.readingcentre.org/Alumni/index.aspx.

At Moorfields’ City Road hospital, there will be an information fair in the foyer from 9am to 1pm with several national organisations hosting stalls and providing leaflets and information on a variety of eye conditions.

Contributing organisations include charities RP Fighting Blindness, the International Glaucoma Association, the RNIB, Keratoconus Group and Maggi Collings from Thea. Representatives from Moorfields’ NIHR clinical research facility will also highlight our work in the field of new treatments and research. Staff from the Certificate for Visual Impairment team will be there to talk about their work and the CVI process.

On an artistic note, artist Heather Bowring will unveil and talk about her new tactile art collection, I’m not who you think I am, at 2pm in the optometry corridor. Heather’s collection, on loan to Moorfields for three months, is the first of what we hope will be a series of visiting exhibitions organised by our arts committee to brighten up our walls and provide visual stimulation for visitors. Also at City Road, jazz pianist Tom Millar will perform a piano recital in the main entrance from 1pm to 2pm, and the hospital’s Costa Coffee franchise will donate its proceeds for the day to Moorfields Eye Charity.

To mark the international aspect of World Sight Day, Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai will be hosting a board meeting of the World Association of Eye Hospitals (WAEH) on Wednesday 8 October. On the day itself, representatives from many of the world’s leading eye hospitals will be discussing how the organisation and delivery of eye care will change over the coming two decades, and how we should prepare ourselves for the significant changes ahead.

Editors Notes

• Moorfields is one of the world’s leading eye hospitals, providing expertise in clinical care, research and education. We have provided excellence in eye care for more than 200 years and we continue to be at the forefront of new breakthroughs and developments. We are an integral part of one of the UK’s first academic health science centres, UCL Partners, and also one of the new academic health science networks. We were one of the first NHS organisations to achieve foundation trust status in 2004.
• We treat the entire range of eye diseases, from common complaints to rare conditions which require treatments not available anywhere else in the UK. 
• We dealt with more than 470,000 patient attendances in 2013/14 across our 21 locations in and around London, enabling us to provide expert care closer to patients’ homes. 
• Our specialist A&E dealt with almost 90,000 patient visits in the year 2013/14.
• With our academic partners at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Moorfields is recognised as a leading centre of excellence in eye and vision research. Together, we form one of the largest ophthalmic research sites in theworld, with the largest patient population in Europe or the USA. We publish more scientific papers than any other eye and vision research site, and have an extensive joint research portfolio.