Abstract
Purpose :
As the U.S. population ages, it is expected that demand for visual care will significantly rise in the next few decades. However, there has been a continuous decline of ophthalmology education in medical school curriculum. This literature review aims to explore research and conceptual pieces on the state of ophthalmology education and investigate potential ways to address current challenges and better prioritize ophthalmology curriculum time in undergraduate and graduate medical education.
Methods :
A search was conducted in PubMed and ERIC with the search terms: ((Ophthalmology[Title]) AND (Education[Title])) AND ((Medical student) OR (Resident)). Irrelevant articles and articles published before 2000 were eliminated, yielding 30 final articles.
Results :
Five primary themes were identified: challenges to ophthalmological education around the world, potential remedies for optimizing ophthalmology curriculum, competency-based ophthalmology education, utilization of technology in ophthalmology education, and ophthalmology service, ethics, and empathy. Major challenges included the lack of a standardized curriculum and inadequate clinical exposure. A number of remedies were proposed, such as increasing adherence to curriculum guidelines, encouraging relationships between ophthalmology faculty and medical school administration committees, and extending utilization of extracurricular activities. Other recommendations included the incorporation of competency-based education, technology-based curriculum, and self-regulated learning. Programs also explored humanistic aspects of ophthalmology education and its role in expanding underserved care.
Conclusions :
In light of challenges in ophthalmology education, ophthalmology programs have increasingly proposed solutions to optimize limited curriculum time. In order to ensure all core competencies are met, there are three major areas to tackle, including: 1) adjusting current curriculum to address learner needs, 2) maximizing learning opportunities by promoting crossover between ophthalmology and other disciplines, and 3) cultivating empathy and service motivation to improve care and increase underserved outreach. Valuable addition to ophthalmology education research would be more qualitative studies engaging the students’ and educators’ perspectives of ophthalmology curriculum, in order to provide a more holistic view of ophthalmology education.
This is a 2021 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.