Response to Comment on: Agreement between optometrists and ophthalmologists in the certification for vision impairment

Abstract

We appreciate the interest of Jawaid et al.1 in our recent paper.2 The comparison of raters to a consensus panel to determine agreement has been widely used in medicine.3-6 We sought to undertake a comparison against a standardised outcome, determined by a consensus panel, rather than the assessment of absolute differences between groups. The former is more meaningful and reliable in the context of the underlying goal of the analysis, to evidence whether low vision optometrists have the appropriate ability in the certification process for vision impairment.We agree with the sensitivity and specificity values calculated by Jawaid et al.1 However, given that such values rely on the underlying assumption that the true state is known, the presentation of agreement values is more appropriate to our study.