Inside Ophthalmology

Against the clock

Residents face a tougher time in their training career than ever before due to COVID-19. Sorcha Ní Dhubhghaill reports

Allow me to add my entry to the long list of things that have gotten more Hoogenboom and Manske are here to help. In their excellent paper “How to write a scientific article”, they offer practical tips and guidelines to target your difficult due to the coronavirus efforts — and it’s open access. pandemic: Being a resident. Once your basic text is

Granted, it was never an completed, try to refine it to easy job to begin with. The make it a really excellent paper. long hours, late surgeries Veronice Gerwin on Nature.com and weekends on call are picked the brains of six research challenging at the best of times. experts and presented them in a But at least you had ample great article called “How to write opportunity to grow and learn a first-class paper”. as a clinician. There has been a huge spike

Fast-forward to today; in the availability of high-quality Clinic numbers have been cut teaching webinars since the down in a lot of places and beginning of the lockdown. How elective surgeries have slowed do you find them? Look on social to a crawl. Meeting numbers media — LinkedIn, Twitter, or are restricted, and not every Facebook — and you should be centre has set up elearning able to find an interesting offer. alternatives. Conferences and They are usually run at about 7 exams are being cancelled, and it’s not clear whether those planned for the autumn will even be able to go ahead. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking for the residents. These months without teaching are adding up. Even in a multiIllustration by Eoin Coveney or 8pm so you can relax and have a glass of wine in the comfort of your own home while you learn. Of course, Youtube and Eyetube have a lot of videos available. The Moran eye centre (https://morancore.utah.edu/) from the University of Utah year training scheme, a couple of months is a significant proportion of the teaching time. And while we can’t change what we can’t change, we can still make has an incredible library of presentations and surgeries on their MoranCore youtube

And while we can’t change efforts to pre-empt a shortage on channel. There are currently what we can’t change, we can still make efforts to pretraining experience 977 videos stored there. The resident lectures in particular empt a shortage on training are great to watch. experience. Below is a curated If you are still looking for list of some of the best (and free) educational resources out more, there are two podcasts in the field that you might want to there to help you at whatever level you need. check out. The Eyes for Ears podcast (www.eyes4ears.com) is

While there are a lot of MCQ practice banks you can purchase run by two ophthalmologists, Ben Young and Andrew Pouw, to help you prepare for exams, the absolutely legendary Chua who met during their ophthalmology residencies in Yale. mrcophth.com page is always worth a visit. The appearance of Their episodes cover a lot, from retinopathies to aniridia, and this page has not changed since I was in med school but don’t are perfect listening for a commute to work. For the posterior let that fool you. This is a fantastic exam preparation site. Some segment specialists, the retina podcast “Straight from the of the clinical data may be a bit out of date but clinical signs and cutter’s mouth” is already up to episode 236 and covers not the volume of the available MCQs is fantastic. only medical and surgical retina but also provides a lot of

If you are earlier on in your training, Tim Root — the “virtual advice about career and practice development. eye professor” — hosts a library of clinical examination video My final tip is a free ebook called Diabetic Retinopathy for the lectures on timroot.com. The optics and retinoscopy sections Comprehensive Ophthalmologist, available at drcobook.com. are particularly useful for first year residency exams. This book might be the most informative and hilarious take on

Most societies have stores of educational materials, and managing diabetic retina patients. The jokes make the text light often provide free membership to trainees. ESCRS and and fun for a topic that can sometimes be really taxing. With Euretina are both free for three years of training and have chapter titles like “Just How Often Do You Have to Drag Them eLearning platforms and on-demand videos of previous Back, Anyway?” this book is as readable as it is useful. conferences presentations.

With a little bit more time on your hands, you may be expected Sorcha Ní Dhubhghaill MB PhD MRCSI(Ophth) FEBO is an to finish that research article or case report that your consultant Anterior Segment Ophthalmic Surgeon at the Netherlands or supervisor has been bugging you about. But how? There is Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery (NIIOS) and Antwerp nothing more intimidating than an empty page. Thankfully, University Hospital