Excellence in Healthcare Professional Education and Support Programmes

Summary of work

Dry eye disease (DED) can have a major impact on patients’ lives, with people making significant compromises to manage their symptoms. Despite the severity of the condition people often struggle to access the right treatments. Ophthalmologists can underappreciate the impact of DED on people’s lives and may delay escalation of treatment with a detrimental effect on patient outcomes and their confidence in the healthcare system.

Our immersive role play education was created to motivate ophthalmologists to think more proactively about the needs of DED patients and build confidence to treat appropriately.

Built around a simulated consultation between a clinician and a patient (played by an actor), the role play was constructed based on real patient insights to highlight their needs and expectations and offer clinicians practical tips to address these.

This innovative training format, which allows the audience to step into a real-life scenario, led to a change in behaviour for attendees – who have modified the way they communicate with patients, how they try to understand their needs and concerns and how they approach decisions around treatment.

Judges' comments

The World Through Patients’ Eyes is a simple but effective initiative to change behaviour. It had good measurement on outcomes and the judges liked the cool insight.