It is over two years since the first Johnson & Johnson Vision Care Institute was opened in Jacksonville, Florida. The aim was to provide a facility to allow practitioners to update their clinical skills and product knowledge and to maintain it in the ever changing area of contact lenses.
The aim was to invite well known speakers to educate practitioners, either from companies or independent groups, in an environment where there would be access to up to date equipment and allow for a good degree of practical interactivity - something essential in contact lens training. This was deemed successful enough for more centres to open up, the next in South Korea and Taipai in 2005, and more in Brazil and Japan.
The first centre in Europe was launched in March this year in Prague, and more are planned, in both southern Europe (Spain or Italy) and one in the UK in the coming years.
Why Prague
Prague was considered the best location, not only because of its centrality, but also because it provided access from the burgeoning new markets of the old Eastern bloc, such as Poland and Russia. The fact that it also happened to be the home town of Otto Wichterle (see box) made it yet more attractive.
The centre comprises a central lecture theatre surrounded by clinic spaces and consulting rooms. Each consulting room area takes the name of pioneering scientists in the contact lens and anterior eye world, including Fick (as in Imbert-Fick law), Jonathan Kersley (pioneer of the MCLA), and Ida Mann (in recognition of the fact that contact lenses are not a purely male preserve).
The rooms varied somewhat from the familiar consulting room to more boardroom style layout but what was really interesting was the 'hidden trickery' which meant that, for example, an interaction could be relayed live to the lecture theatre. Similarly, the live feeds from the slit lamp could also be displayed this way. This makes live demonstration to a larger audience possible, but also allows more general discussion on things such as communication skills and body language easy to demonstrate. One of the rooms had a two-way mirror panel specifically for this purpose and data relating to interview style and questioning patterns could be usefully gathered from different groups.
The last of the rooms is somewhat confidently called the 'Consulting Room of the Future' which, other than not yet having a topographer, also lacked a slit lamp.
Some attendants at the event claimed the slit lamp would not be needed in future - personally, I'm not sure I'll live to see that!
The central area includes a modernist clay likeness of Professor Otto Wichterle, inventor of HEMA, and was unveiled in a tearful ceremony by his son Kamil.
The lecture theatre had many features which I hope will become more familiar in years to come. Every seat had a voting and interaction button, making data acquisition possible without the need to distribute hand-held consoles. In practising with this equipment, the vote was cast that the most likely team to win this year's world cup is the Czech Republic with England a poor second. Data cannot always be trusted unless the sampling is transparent.
Disconcertingly, every seat may be filmed such that a questioner may appear live on screen before all, something that vice president of the Institute Ian Davies enjoyed very much during his introductory speech.
It will be exciting to see how much this centre is used by UK practitioners in years to come, and even more interesting to look forward to such a facility being set up in the UK in the next couple of years.
Professor Wichterle: a life in research
Professor Otto Wichterle (1913-1998) lived long enough to see the great impact of his hydrogel material invention upon the world, as well as the dismantling of the repressive world in which he had suffered for many years.
His initial research had been upon prosthetics and implantable materials, but in 1961 he famously used his son's Meccano set to construct a centrifuge able to cast a HEMA polymer which might then be used as a contact lens. His opposition to the occupation of Prague by the Warsaw Pact forces in 1968 led to his virtual house arrest and the loss of his directorship of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, where he instead continued as a basic grade scientist until the political changes of 1989.