Around 80 people attended this year’s annual conference held at FMHS on Sunday 29 July for a mixture of clinical sessions, research updates, and hands-on workshops.
Keynote speakers Drs Jack Phu and Angelica Ly from the Centre for Eye Health in Sydney were well-received. Jack opened the proceedings with a talk on reconciling structure and function in disease diagnosis and Angelica later presented a talk on multimodal imaging, with a concise review of imaging technologies currently available. Other sessions with a focus on advancing clinical practice included SOVS presenters John McLennan speaking about linkages between glaucoma and ethnicity; Robert Ng discussing some of the similarities and differences between the US and NZ models of eye care after visiting SUNY; and Dr Geraint Phillips providing an update on the treatment for Adenovirus.
Research updates included a talk by Associate Professor Sam Schwarzkopf on ocular illusions and his research around tuning of the visual cortex and its links to perception. Dr Lisa Hamm shared her results on a series of studies measuring recognition acuity in children using a new set of optotypes developed at the school. A group of current opportunity undergraduate students presented results from their summer projects. Joe Tanner from Coopervision provided an update on the international study of MiSight 1-day contact lenses while Alex Petty of Bay Eye Care spoke of the need to develop a NZ myopia action group.
The afternoon consisted of two workshop sessions providing in-depth and hands-on demonstrations where participants could choose two specialist topics from a range of options.
Many thanks to all the presenters, sponsors, and those behind the scenes who enabled the conference to go ahead, as well as to Rebecca Findlay for her more detailed story for NZ Optics and Jean Choi for the accompanying photographs. Feedback received has been very positive and planning will begin shortly for professional development events in 2019 and 2020.