Implementation and evaluation of an ophthalmic nurse practitioner emergency eye clinic

Abstract

This study demonstrates the safety and effectiveness of an ONP emergency eye clinic when practising within a defined scope of practice. An ONP-led emergency eye clinic is a viable addition to acute ophthalmic eye care in Australia.

A nurse-led ocular oncology clinic in Liverpool: results of a 6-month trial

“…[8][9][10][11][12][13] The role of the nurse-led clinic in an acute care setting has at least a 15-year history in the United Kingdom. 12 The main benefit of the nurse-led clinic is that it provides patients with specialist expertise and equipments that are not available in general ophthalmic clinics while reducing the workload of the ophthalmologist's ocular oncology clinic.…”

Nurse specialist treatment of eye emergencies: Five year follow up study of quality and effectiveness

“…(Buchan et al, 2003) This same method of assessing safety of a specialist nurse emergency eye service by identification of re-attendances has also been utilised by other investigators (Kirkwood et al, 2005).…”

“…There are also good examples of institutions where nurse specialists independently diagnose and manage significant proportions of patients presenting to emergency eye services without the need for referral to an ophthalmologist (Jones et al, 1986;Ilango et al, 2000;Buchan et al, 2003). The high quality of service provided by specialist nurses has frequently been reported, with one study finding the patient management by nursing staff to be more evidence based than that of the ophthalmologists (Kirkwood et al, 2005;Bhatt and Sandramouli, 2007).…”

The urgent need to develop emergency EYE care in the UK: the way forward?

“…6,[15][16][17][18] The fact that an EEC MDT can function well is beyond debate, but this does not guarantee that appropriate staff can be recruited and many interviewees reported valuable MDT members being difficult to replace on leaving.…”