Bill Harvey: We need to look at our screening strategy

Screening is a complicated issue. You often hear it stated that one role of the community optometrist is screening for eye disease, but this is not really the case. An effective screening strategy, as we all remember, should be sensitive enough to detect any particular disease and specific enough for a normal individual to easily pass as normal.

The influence of risk factors may help identify target groups for screening which improves the two ‘S’s for the restricted sample but fail those few individuals falling outside the selected sample. Screening whole populations brings in economic considerations – can the strategy be implemented easily enough by a large number of personnel with adequate training, can the strategy be accessible to all within the population, and can it be acceptable enough to the population to encourage good attendance and address any pre-held health beliefs?