eyePATCH adventures: eyeYPAG’s March 2021 meeting by Berkley

By Vijay Tailor-Hamblin,

We started this eyeYPAG meeting with a scavenger hunt!


Then Jacq showed us all the final version of our group shared agreements, with a new border designed by Niamh and Orla. You can see the video and read more about them here: https://generationr.org.uk/eyeypag_shared-agreements/. We agreed that we would play the video at the start of every meeting to remind us of how we want to work together.

Then Jacq showed us the new Co-Production Collective website and the information about our group which has been put on there.

After that a researcher, Daniel Osborne, talked to us about his plans to do research on children’s amblyopia (also called lazy eye) and how wearing eye patches can help improve eyesight for children who have this condition. He then went on to talk Some children have to wear these eye patches up to 6 hours a day or use eye drops which stop one eye from being used. If patches are not used properly the treatment won’t work. In his research, Daniel is trying to find out what will encourage children to wear their eye patch and see it as an activity rather than a chore. We talked about how to give children a say in whether they wear it, how long and what it looks like, also to encourage children to wear their eye patch and see it as an activity rather than a chore. Some of his ideas include mobile phone apps, some sort of reward system, an eye patch poster that once you took your eye patch off you would put it on the poster and once you completed your treatment the poster would form an image.


In breakout groups we had a go at designing an eye patch on the Zoom whiteboard. Our ideas included:

  • making the eye patches easier to apply and take off
  • having different sizes to make the eye patch more comfortable
  • children could design their own eye patch and/or one for other children
  • having a sticker chart for every day you wear and patch and getting a treat when you’ve filled it in
  • giving children alternatives to an app as not everyone would be able to access this

Daniel said:

The group were very good at volunteering their ideas.  I think this is because of the structured but informal nature of the meeting.  The group’s values and culture to voice, listen and respect all’s opinions was evident in the meeting.  I think these values are what enables the group to contribute so effectively to my project.

Some of us are working with Louca-Mai to evaluate our group and after the break we did an eyeYPAG quiz to see how much people remembered and then the young evaluators ran two focus groups with the other group members. We talked about:

  • How the group works
  • How we work with researchers
  • What we like and what we think could be improved about our meetings
  • What we’d like eyeYPAG to do and look like in the future