Enhanced services: Primary care in South Wales

Our practice has been instrumental in developing a novel approach to wet AMD monitoring and management. Patients previously under the hospital eye service (HES) for wet AMD who have not required injection for several months are selected by a consultant ophthalmologist and offered the opportunity to be reviewed in primary care.

When the patient was initially seen in the practice, this was with the ophthalmologist present who was able to review the OCT scans taken alongside copies of the hospital notes. In the early stages of the pilot, the consultant would attend all of the follow up appointments in our practice. As we gained more experience, and the ophthalmologist became more confident about our abilities, we simply reviewed the patient ourselves without direct observation and reported our findings using our local hospital intra-vitreal therapy (IVT) form.