Careful choices in vision health

Today we talk about health literacy and the ophthalmologist Helena Prior Filipe tells us about the project Choosing Wisely - Critical Choices in Health based on scientific evidence:

It is a global Health Education programme, founded in 2012 in the United States of America by the American Board of Internal Medicine. It was subsequently adapted and implemented in various countries, such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Wales, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. And also in Portugal.

In Portugal, the programme is based at the Portuguese Ordem dos Médicos, with the aim of promoting health literacy and the involvement and participation of the public and patients in clinical decision-making. A clinical decision that is shared and itself based on effective clinical communication between clinician and patient, the public, about the best clinical choices based on evidence. And, in this way, improving the quality of clinical service while using the available resources of the health systems in an effective and efficient way.

The Ophthalmology College has so far prepared three recommendations that are aimed at health professionals, with information open to the public and to patients. Therefore, this information and the entire programme can be consulted and are open on the website of the Portuguese Ordem dos Médicos.

The three recommendations made by the Ophthalmology College, justifying :

not choose, on the one hand, to exclude the possibility of a diagnosis of glaucoma, even if the measurement of intraocular pressure has values considered normal;

do not routinely choose to prescribe topical antibiotics in preoperative situations of cataract surgery;

And do not uniformly choose to prescribe eye drops that include corticoids for the treatment of red eye, if the possibility of a disease that contraindicates the use of these same corticoids is not taken into account.

It is a very meaningful programme, and the Ophthalmology College immediately embraced this project of the Portuguese Ordem dos Médicos.

In tomorrow's programme we talk about the calculation of formative capacities in Ophthalmology.

With the support of the Portuguese Society of Ophthalmology.