Impact of myopia – on CPD

In this short article, I need you to imagine we are already required to undertake CPD. Using myopia as an example of one area of personal development where I felt it important to develop my skills and knowledge base, I will show you how I have undertaken some fictional CPD exercises of different modalities to help me become more confident in dealing with myopic patients and, ultimately, hope to offer them a better standard of care. The following descriptions are fictional, but I hope might help to illustrate some points about CPD completion.

As I explained at the start of the CPD cycle, my scope of practice is primarily in a primary care low vision practice setting. In recent years, I have noticed the high number of visually impaired patients who have some form of myopic degenerative change. This presents some challenges in their assessment, particularly in accurate refraction and dispensing of very high ametropia and problems in imaging (we have recently acquired an OCT and some of the scans of myopes are proving less than repeatable). I also feel that my approach to their visual impairment management might be limited. Furthermore, recently, I have noticed how some myopic patients have been asking about myopia inheritance, having concerns about their children suffering similar problems to them, and also have shown some interest in media reports about myopia management strategies.