Eyeworld

MAY 2013

EyeWorld is the official news magazine of the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery.

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May 2013 EW NEWS & OPINION 11 Chief medical editor's corner of the world Outgoing president highlights new ASCRS educational initiatives by David F. Chang, MD It's been a great honor to serve as ASCRS president during the past year. In my speech as outgoing president at the ASCRS Opening General Session of the annual meeting last month, I reviewed some of the new educational initiatives launched by ASCRS. The speech is printed below. I David F. Chang, MD, chief medical editor n my address as your new president one year ago, I highlighted several core values that make our profession uniquely rewarding, including charity and our remarkable willingness to teach and help one another. Let me highlight some new ASCRS initiatives in this realm of education. My term began with reexamination of a longstanding desire by our leadership to supplement non-surgical education for optometrists employed by our members. A 2012 ASCRS member survey conducted by an independent agency showed that approximately half of our domestic members either employ optometrists or, in the case of integrated organizations such as the VA or Kaiser, work alongside optometrists. The ASCRS board coined the acronym IOMED—which stands for Integrated Ophthalmic-Managed Eyecare Delivery—to classify such practice settings in which ophthalmologists clinically supervise and work alongside employed optometrists and technicians to provide care in a coordinated and efficient manner that best serves patients. Our leadership staunchly opposes the attempts by organized optometry to add surgery to their scope of practice. This past year ASCRS gave $50,000 to the Academy's Surgical Scope Fund and wants to applaud and support our colleagues fighting on the state level to oppose optometric surgical scope expansion. A task force comprised of IOMED optometrists and several ASCRS past presidents, including chairman Stephen Lane, MD, was formed to debate the role of optometrists within ASCRS. They considered numerous options, including the formation of an affiliated society for IOMED optometrists employed by ASCRS members. However, in the end, they recommended that an affiliated optometric organization was not necessary to support and Edward Holland, MD, presents Dr. Chang with a plaque commemorating his year as president of ASCRS at the Opening General Session. Source: EyeWorld expand the IOMED model. Instead, the focus will remain on non-surgical education for IOMED-employed optometrists, and a special educational program for this purpose debuts at this annual meeting. Member-employed ODs now have the option of earning optometric continuing education credits at an ASCRS-sponsored program as a new alternative to traditional optometry meetings. We recognize that allowing even this select subgroup of optometrists to attend our meeting is controversial and in the 2012 member survey, 16% disagreed with this decision. However, four times as many respondents supported this new educational program for IOMED optometrists. ASCRS continues to expand our efforts to support resident surgical education. Last year, a special program for residents and fellows debuted at our annual meeting. This year, the UCSF advanced microsurgery course for residents is being held in conjunction with our meeting. EyeWorld now features four regular columns of special interest to trainees and is mailed to every resident in the United States. Further- more, I'm happy to report that new digital and mobile device versions of EyeWorld are now available to every ophthalmologist in the world with internet access. The ASCRS Foundation has partnered with the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary to distribute Cataract Master—the first interactive computer-based program to use surgical footage to simulate intraoperative decision making. This unique learning tool, developed by Bonnie Henderson, MD, and John Loewenstein, MD, has received glowing reviews from both residents and experienced cataract surgeons alike. The exploding demand of aging populations worldwide will require many more phaco surgeons to be trained in the next decade. We are proud and excited to officially introduce the new, online ASCRS Phaco Fundamentals Classroom, phaco.ascrs.org. Intended as a onestop website to support phaco training, the site hosts lectures, teaching videos, articles, and textbook chapters—all selected and indexed by an editorial board made up of leaders in resident phaco education. This webbased classroom features our best teaching resources and faculty and can be accessed for free by any ophthalmologist in the world through our website. This year, we also launched a unique web portal called the Global Sight Alliance developed by ophthalmologist Stan Pletcher, MD, and Mission Eyes Network, and funded by the ASCRS Foundation. Any ophthalmologist who links to www.globalsight.org through our website will find a centralized educational site devoted to cataract blindness in the developing world. It also networks ophthalmologists with a continually updated registry of global organizations that need and welcome volunteers to work and teach in the developing world. Complementing our web-based phaco classroom, Global Sight Alliance has an online classroom devoted to learning manual small incision extracapsular surgery, with educational videos, lectures, and teaching manuals. This year our leadership and Clinical Committees were asked to identify educational gaps and were then tasked with developing a new series of CME programs that specifically targets these clinical needs. For example, a new EyeWorld program designed to teach cataract surgeons to perform postoperative PRK enhancement on refractive IOL patients took place at the meeting. We recently launched ASCRS This Week, a weekly online newsletter that highlights clinical information and news about the Society's programs for our members. Based on feedback from our membership survey, we plan to push more educational content to our members through mobile media and apps in the coming year. I also remind you to visit our online MediaCenter, where ASCRS members can view symposia, courses, and videos from our various meetings throughout the year on demand. Finally, Dick Lindstrom, MD, will introduce a new ASCRS Foundation initiative to support the development of cataract surgical training centers in strategic underserved areas of Ethiopia. There are only 80 ophthalmologists in this country of 85 million, and half of them are clustered in the capital city of Addis Ababa, where less than 6% of the population resides. With such a continued on page 12

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