Spring 2022 eye YPAG meeting by RN

By Vijay Tailor-Hamblin,

On Saturday April 23 we met one more time on Zoom – we so hope that our next meeting will be face-to-face again! It was great to see each other on screen at least. We talked about what everyone had been doing over the Spring holidays. Then Dr Thomas gave an update on project Oriel, the new eye hospital that will be built in central London. It will combine Moorfields clinics and operating theatres, research labs for UCL and education areas. We liked the open and airy design.

Annegret reported on progress with the schools workshop project. Our group and Moorfields Young People’s Forum are helping with developing online workshops to tell young people about eyes and vision, eye conditions and about working in an eye clinic. We will run these workshops in secondary schools very soon, and hope that they will inspire students to join one of the Moorfields clinics across London as “young volunteers”, and maybe even think of a career in the NHS. The workshop website looks great; the designers are using the colour scheme that we had suggested, and have put in some great content.

We had a presentation on a research study with a new piece of kit to measure the length of the eyeball. We think it will be great for children and young people, because it is small and hand-held and doesn’t touch the eye.

Jacq told us about the interview training that’s coming up for us from next week. Together with members of the YPAG at Great Ormond Street Hospital, some of us will get professional training about how to interview children and young people in a sensitive way, yet getting research questions answered. Not all of us can take part, because the training is on three afternoons after school, but Jacq said that maybe they could repeat the training in the summer.

Jasmine presented a new research project about developing a new kind of eyepatch for children with amblyopia (“lazy eye”). Moorfields Eye Charity are funding a summer project for an engineering student to run a proof of concept research study with adults, sticking a temperature sensor on an eyepatch which measures how many hours the person is wearing the patch for. At the end of that study, the team plan to develop a prototype eyepatch. Jasmine asked us about how to find out what children and parents think about the new eyepatch.

That was as much as we could pack into a two-hour meeting. We really need to have those longer meetings again, where we can also chat to our friends over biscuits and lunch!