IACLE World Congress: Educating the practitioners of the future

‘Among the greatest challenges we face as educators is time, and providing large numbers of students with an equal clinical experience. That and money.’

This comment at the Third IACLE World Congress on Contact Lens Education might well have come from any one of more than 100 contact lens educators attending from 30 countries around the world, from Nepal to Poland to Guatemala.

But the speaker was Judy Perrigin, chair of the Association of Optometric Contact Lens Educators (AOCLE) and Professor of Optometry at one of the largest schools in the US, at the University of Houston, Texas.

Professor Perrigin’s experience highlighted the similarities rather than differences between contact lens teaching worldwide and the need to harness technology to overcome the common challenges that educators face.