Winner announced - Royal College of Ophthalmologists Sustainability Prize

This is now the fourth year of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists Sustainability Prize sponsored by Bausch and Lomb. Previous winners have included sustainable community cataract pathways, virtual glaucoma clinics and paediatric cataract screening. This year out 198 abstracts  accepted for presentation at the College Congress 61 (31%) were considered to fulfil one of the seven steps to sustainability. These are interventions which prevent disease or morbidity, improve productivity, streamline pathways, reduce procurement costs or carbon dioxide emissions, educate and empower patients or healthcare professionals and facilitate more patient centred care. All were assessed on the overall quality of the project but also their contribution to hitting the triple bottom line of reduced financial, social and environmental costs (people, profits and planet).  This strong field was narrowed down to 20 candidates which highlighted a huge selection of innovative approaches to increasing sustainability including sms appointment reminders, intensive cataract training, several virtual clinics, triage websites, eyefficiency apps, delphi exercises focussed on improving sustainability, point of care HBA1c testing in the eye clinic and prescription patterns for glaucoma drugs. The overall winner was Simon Kelly’s project entitled “Thematic analysis of treatment naïve wAMD patients in  NHS hospitals: Qualitative lessons from the LUMINOUS study” which highlighted factors associated with good outcomes for patients in different centres including training of nurse injectors, no cancel appointments, virtual and one stop clinics amongst other strategies. Congratulations to all the entries for their great work and to Simon and team for their contribution to the ongoing sustainability of services treating age related macular degeneration in Europe.