The Portsea Lord Mayor's Children's Camp Vision Screening: A Rationale and Protocol for Op to metric Screening

Abstract

The development of a new screening protocol, The Portsea Modified Clinical Technique (PMCT), is described. This screening technique was designed for use with children in the eight to fourteen years age group and includes such measures as ocular motility, fusional vergence, accommodation, stereopsis and colour vision in addition to the traditional modified clinical test battery. Some six thousand children have been examined using this protocol which requires a screening time of five to six minutes. Referral criteria are given as guidelines only, with the clinician retaining the responsibility for classification on the basis of the whole clinical profile. It is argued that the Orinda MCT criteria can no longer be regarded as inclusive of all the most relevant parameters. Details of the screening administration and instrumentation are outlined.

Referral rates for a functional vision screening among a large cosmopolitan sample of Australian children

“…The addition of children already under care but not requiring immediate attention, brought the number who failed the screening guidelines to 26.86%, which is similar to the 20% reported for males and 26% for females after MCT examination of a whole primary school by Coleman (1970), and to the 29.2% found by Robbins and Bailey (1975) in a large study of children aged 3±11 years (also using the MCT), and the 28.1% found by Dwyer (1983) using an expanded version of the MCT that included accommodative-convergence tests. In some instances (approximately 2%), it was not possible to infer from the record card exactly why the child was referred for further assessment.…”

“…This highlights the difficulties for the supervising optometrist in articulating the reason why a consultation has been brought to a particular conclusion, given that the parent is not present, and, as is the case in most screenings, the optometrist has not himself carried out all of the testing. Indeed, when constructing the Portsea Modified Clinical Technique (Dwyer, 1983) for use at summer camps, it was decided that it was more appropriate to refer based upon the clinician’s opinion that ‘the child would benefit from full clinical assessment’ rather than on specific pre‐determined criteria. One particular difficulty encountered for our screening was the poor ability of parents of non‐English speaking backgrounds to convey symptoms and history via a simple questionnaire.…”

Review of guidelines for children’s vision screenings

“…Prior to this, from the late 1940s, optometrists had been performing ad hoc vision tests on approximately 2,000 school children each year at this location. The Portsea MCT added fusional vergence, accommodative facility, ocular motility, stereopsis and colour vision tests to the Orinda battery, on the basis that these tests were more comprehensive in their measurement of visual parameters ostensibly associated with reduced school performance …”

Portsea Modified Clinical Technique: Evaluation of an Expanded Optometric Vision Screening Protocol for Children

“…An optometric based screening, the Modified Clinical Technique (MCT), has been shown to satisfy these requirements better than alternative screening meth-0ds.2.3 However there is a need to continually update screening procedures as our understanding of children's vision improves.*. 9 The Portsea Modified Clinical Tech-nique (PMCT) is an attempt to bring children's vision screening into line with current practices in paediatric optometry. 9 The aim of this paper is to evaluate the PMCT as an effective measure for screening children's vision.…”

“…9 The Portsea Modified Clinical Tech-nique (PMCT) is an attempt to bring children's vision screening into line with current practices in paediatric optometry. 9 The aim of this paper is to evaluate the PMCT as an effective measure for screening children's vision. Results from 1982-83 screenings are used for comparison with standard screening techniques.…”