Knowledge of medications among patients with glaucoma in Taiwan

Health literacy and ophthalmology: A scoping review

As of 2020, it is estimated that 43.3 million people are blind, and an additional 553 million have mild to severe vision impairment.50 At least 1 billion worldwide have a vision impairment that could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed.54 Poor health literacy may be a significant contributor to the prevalence of eye disease. With implications on disease burden, progression, and health outcomes, a greater understanding of the role health literacy plays in ophthalmology is needed. This is the first scoping review to assess the impact of health literacy on eye health outcomes and blindness, including ocular screening rates and/or follow-up rates, treatment adherence, and self-care practices. PubMed, Embase, and CINAHL databases were searched systematically through November 12, 2021, and we evaluated the association between health literacy and ophthalmic outcomes in 4 domains: clinical outcomes, treatment adherence rates, screening and/or follow-up rates, and self-care practices. There is evidence to suggest that health literacy is associated with ophthalmic outcomes in all these domains. To better understand how health literacy impacts eye health, further longitudinal studies examining the effect of health literacy (using standardized health literacy measures) on ophthalmic outcomes are needed. We believe a specific ophthalmic health literacy survey could help achieve this goal and help target interventions to ultimately improve outcomes among ophthalmology patients.

Patient-centred care in ophthalmology: current practices, effectiveness and challenges

PURPOSE

To summarise different patient-centred care approaches that can be used in ophthalmology and review their effectiveness.

METHODS

An Entrez Pubmed search on publications concerning different patient-centred care was performed on September 7, 2021. Articles on animal research, non-English language and review articles were excluded after manually screening by two authors.

RESULTS

A total of 16 articles were reviewed after curation by the authors for relevance. Patient-centred care has advantages in improving disease knowledge, enhancing doctor-patient communications and improving mental well-being of patients. Various methods including intensive patient education, patient-centred communication techniques during consultations, personal disease records, education programme for caregivers, on-site ocular care for residential care home resident and shared medical appointments can be used to enhance patient-centred care.

CONCLUSIONS

Current strategies in patient-centred care in ophthalmology were found to be useful. However, they have not been widely practised and more studies would be required generate an evidence-based recommendation for future use.