Description
The RCP will be hosting a public lecture by the 2017 winner of the Royal Photographic Society Combined Royal Colleges Medal, Dr Bastawrous. This collaborative lecture will focus on technical advances in eyecare which will transform people’s lives all over the world in the restoration of their vision.
To book this event please visit the Royal Photography Society’s website via this link
36 million people in the world are blind, and the majority lose their sight due to curable and preventable conditions. Millions more people worldwide are held back because they don’t live near eye health facilities or can’t access treatment. But how do you test and treat people who live in remote areas, where one eye doctor might serve a population of 2 million people and expensive, bulky eye equipment is hard to come by?
“The Combined Royal Colleges Medal is awarded for an outstanding contribution to the advancement and/or application of medical photography or the wider field of medical imaging. The Royal Photographic Society (RPS), the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Royal College of Physicians of London and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists collaborated together to establish the medal in 1958.”
Dr Andrew Bastawrous, CEO of Peek Vision and Associate Professor of International Eye Health at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, will tell the story of Peek Vision, which has developed a cost-effective portable smartphone eye camera and app to help identify people with eyesight problems and connect them to local health workers. Peek’s smartphone-based technology also generates data which enables healthcare providers to supply cost-effective, targeted treatment, and Andrew will explain how the programme has grown from a PhD research project to an internationally-adopted national programme in just five years.
The lecture will commence at 6.30pm on 15 November 2018 and is priced at £3.00 for RPS members and £5.00 for non-RPS members
Image Credit: Peek Retina is a low-cost, portable smartphone ophthalmoscope that enables capture of retinal images from a dilated eye in any location. It is being used here in to capture images of a man’s eyes in Nakuru, Kenya. (© Mazda / Brandon Roots)