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Eye-YPAG blog 12 April 2025 Jasmine Noor

By Vijay Tailor-Hamblin,

Our April meeting was packed with learning and giving advice. Berni Graham held the second session of our training as interviewers in qualitative research projects. We went over what we had learned in the first session – open and closed questions, body language, and that consent can be withdrawn at any time. Then we talked about other things that are important in interviews, such as keeping the information confidential, and we learned some new terms such as bias. Bias means that sometimes we can influence the answers by the way we ask the questions, or we may hear something that we expect to hear, rather than what the person is actually saying. We practiced interviewing through role play, which really showed how important body language and eye contact are, and that it is important to listen carefully.

After lunch Annegret asked us to check information leaflets about an eye-check study at schools. The leaflets were for 8-15 year olds and for 16-18 year olds. We told her to make another version for younger kids age 8-11 years, because they won’t be interested in too much detail. Annegret also asked us about two possible extra tests. The first one is to collect tears using strips of filter paper. Some of us tried it out, and we think that this won’t be much fun for children who don’t have anything wrong with their eyes. It would be ok for children who have an inflammation of the surface of the eyes, and are willing to have a test where something touches the surface of the eyes, but not for all kids in a school!

Then she asked us about a new model of research glasses which can measure how close people hold books and screens to their face, and also how much light they get. We thought the frames looked really bulky, and nobody would want to wear them at school, not even if all kids in a classroom would wear them. Annegret will take that feedback away and speak to the designers……

Charlotte from the charity Friends of Moorfields came and talked to us about a new edition of the charity’s magazine for children and young people. We discussed what features would be interesting for young people, particularly about the new eye hospital, Oriel, which Moorfields will move to in 2027. Another article in the magazine will be an interview with a lady who works at Moorfields. We think that it is great to learn a bit more about people who work at Moorfields, because it makes them more human.

 

During the last part of the meeting, Annegret gave us some questionnaires. They were very short and easy, and our job was to say how they were different. We worked out that they were all asking us about how we feel, physically and mentally – they are questionnaires to measure quality of life in children. We talked about which one we think would work best with children, and why. Annegret then told us that measuring quality of life is one part of health economics. This is about how the NHS pays for medicines and glasses for children. An organisation called NICE decides about which treatments the NHS should pay for. At previous meetings, we had talked about new treatments for myopia, and we learned that NICE is now planning to check whether the NHS should pay for atropine eye drops to slow down myopia. The way they look at this is that they want to know whether a treatment improves people’s quality of life, and whether the NHS would save any money long-term by paying for a treatment that may reduce expensive complications or disabilities. We thought this was quite interesting and actually very important. We hope that an expert could come to one of our next meetings and tell us more about it. Maybe we can write a guide on this topic for other YPAGs, children and young people and parents/carers. We looked at an existing guide for adults, which was not too hard to read for teenagers, but way to difficult for young children. We already started to make it better, for example by moving the glossary to the end, and we want to put in some pictures.

Then time was up, and we gave feedback: lots of interesting new things, please bring pizza next time! We got certificates for the Research Interview Training and also – new eye-YPAG T-shirts and hoodies!