Introduction

It’s been around 3 years since I started running teaching sessions in eye pathology aimed at trainee ophthalmologists, and I think it’s time I started recording some of the cases and discussions, hence starting this blog.

For those of you who haven’t been to these sessions, some explanation. I’m an eye pathologist working for Moorfields Eye Hospital, with my laboratory based in the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. We get specimens from Moorfields and various other locations, mainly in England. Unsurprisingly, we get large numbers of specimens with common diagnoses, but also a fair number with rare diagnoses. 

About once a month, I select some cases I’ve seen recently, both rare cases and those with a nice “textbook” appearance, and I run a teaching session for the trainee ophthalmologists. We all sit round a multiheader microscope and discuss the slides. This helps the trainees who are preparing for exams, and also gives them a feel for how laboratory processes work. I hope the latter will help the trainees decide how to make sensible use of laboratory services after they move on.

There are a couple of practical limitations to these sessions. Firstly, the multiheader microscope only has space for 3 (or at a pinch, 4) observers, so I can teach a maximum of 4 people at a time. The other limitation is that people may have other commitments and be unable to attend the session on a particular date.

So, my plan here is to keep a record of the cases we’ve looked at and issues we have discussed. These posts can be a reminder to those who attended, and provide a little bit of eye pathology education to those who didn’t. And hopefully some encouragement to attend a future session! The images I show here will give some idea of what different entities look like down a microscope, but they really are no substitute for seeing cases “live”.

My next teaching session will be on 23 March, and I’ll post again shortly after that. I hope you enjoy the cases 🙂