The role of nurse practitioners in a primary care eye clinic

Implementation and evaluation of an ophthalmic nurse practitioner emergency eye clinic

“…The results are in concordance with other studies elsewhere. Nurse practitioners have played an important role in recent times both in North America and Europe, particularly the UK 1,5 , 7 . These results suggest a way of expanding the ophthalmic workforce and increasing access to emergency eye care.…”

Primary care and ophthalmology in the United Kingdom

“…50 Nurses were shown to be capable of managing minor conditions and successfully triaging patients in ophthalmic casualty departments and over the telephone. 38 [64][65][66] Although the diagnostic accuracy of optometrists appears to be variable according to the part of the eye examined, 67 it has been shown that targeted training of optometrists for specific diagnostic tasks results in a high degree of accuracy. 68 The difference that orthoptists' participation makes in the visual screening of children, in terms of specificity and sensitivity, 69 and their ability to detect subtle conditions, has been demonstrated.…”

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

“…Many reports now exist demonstrating the usefulness of specialist nurses in triage of patients with emergency eye problems (Banerjee et al, 1998;Marsden, 2000;Cheung et al, 2002;Rossi et al, 2008) and in improving the quality of referral to specialist eye services from general accident and emergency (A&E) departments (Ezra 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 proportion of emergency eye patients thereby seen exclusively by nurses varies in published reports from 17-69% (Jones et al, 1986;Banerjee et al, 1998;Ilango et al, 2000;Buchan et al, 2003;Bhatt and Sandramouli, 2007). This variation is a result of case mix, local protocols guiding the decision to treat or refer on, and the level of confidence and experience of the nurses involved in the various schemes.…”

“…When a department decides to have nurses acting as independent practitioners, diagnosing and treating ophthalmic emergency patients, published reports describe an initial training of already experienced eye nurses in the use of slit lamp and appropriate practical procedures such as corneal foreign body removal (Jones et al, 1986;Ilango et al, 2000;Buchan et al, 2003). No mention is made, however, of continuing professional development for nurses working in this role to facilitate the life long learning process that is an essential part of skill maintenance.…”