Dry eye disease education with WCO

Earlier this year, the World Council of Optometry (WCO) and Alcon announced the formation of a new partnership focusing on dry eye disease.

The partnership has since announced an education initiative that will see experts lead a series of webinars exploring dry eye disease and its management.

The first webinar will be held on 8 November, focusing on ‘Dry Eye Disease Mitigation.’

In the approach to the first webinar in the series, OT spoke to WCO president-elect, Sandra Block, to find out more about the partnership, and what can be expected from the education initiative.

What led to the partnership between WCO and Alcon to launch the dry eye disease education initiative?

From the World Council of Optometry’s (WCO) perspective, a lot of things changed when the World Report on Vision came out and highlighted the huge numbers of visual impairment and blindness. There is a lot of focus on the more than 2 billion people who have lost vision, and the one billion people who have yet to be served, but there was something else in the report that hasn’t been highlighted as much as it should be: the vision problems that don’t typically cause visual impairment and blindness, but certainly affect quality of life.

There are a lot of people with dry eye disease who are uncomfortable and complaining. Dry eye disease impacts quality of life, but people have somewhat ignored it along the way.

Typically, it is assumed that dry eye disease affects adults, such as women who are going through menopause. But over the past few years with the pandemic, and both children and adults on devices constantly, we find that people are more symptomatic and aware of the potential for dry eye disease. I am not saying that device use is causing it, but now all of a sudden we have become more aware of it. We also know now that it is not just a problem in adults, but in children as well.

We are so excited to partner with Alcon because this is an opportunity for us to work together to educate optometry globally about very straightforward and practical ways to address dry eye disease. With appropriate diagnosis and treatment, we could probably reduce it significantly.

The partnership also gives us the opportunity to make sure that those that have an underlying ocular surface disease get to that next step of a secondary level of care. Dry eye disease has always been thought of as something very superficial, but there are a lot of underlying problems that go along with it. By appropriate diagnosis and intervention, those people who have the more serious problems can be identified early, before there is any damage to the eye. While those make up a small percentage of people, that is really important.

Could you summarise what the initiative is going to involve?

Our plans are to create a suite of materials, and the most important pieces will initially be the webinars. These start on 8 November, with a new webinar to be released every two months. We are going to be breaking down dry eye disease into three pieces: mitigation, measurement, and management.

This will be done with three people who are renowned in that area: Professor Jennifer Craig from New Zealand, Professor Lyndon Jones from Canada, and Professor James Wolffsohn from the UK.

These webinars will have a very different design. In a conversational manner, the webinar leaders will share all of the important components of understanding what dry eye disease is, how to assess it, and how to manage it. The aim is to make it much more approachable for the clinician and practice, with the goal of getting clinicians to think about dry eye disease as something they could integrate into a primary care mode of practice.

Those webinars are going to be uploaded to a dedicated website which will have a whole suite of pieces that will help clinicians to integrate this into their practice. One of the challenges we have as the WCO is that our members and optometrists around the world have very different ways of practising, based on legislative issues and scope of practice. The goal of these webinars and tools will be that the individual optometrists can utilise the knowledge and information within their scope of practice, and know when they need to move something on to the secondary or tertiary level. I think it will help them to feel like they are a part of the solution.

What can practitioners expect from the educational events?

When they listen to the webinars I think they are going to find themselves feeling much more engaged in the identification of dry eye disease and treatments, so that their patients are happier, but might also reduce the long-term effect of some ocular surface diseases.

The resources are going to be available on our website for the long-term. Our goal is to make sure those tools are kept fresh and up-to-date, so that they can come back to the website multiple times to get more information.

Through this partnership with Alcon, we can’t overstate the value of the tools that we are going to try to put together for the practising clinician. The goal is to support practices to the fullest scope of what they are able to do on the ground. We also want them to understand that, if they can’t do it themselves, they know where to go to get the care for their patients. There are plans to launch something during the first webinar that will outline the different levels of addressing dry eye disease at each level of practice. It will be an exciting tool.

This is a great opportunity for us to address a prevalent problem, and one that affects quality of life more than many of the vision problems we deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Why is this project on dry eye disease needed? Why now?

There is a lot of research in the area of dry eye disease, and better surveillance as to how many people are afflicted with the disease. They say dry eye disease affects over 1.4 billion people – though we know it varies depending on what the geography is and where they are living. But we know more about how to diagnose and manage it. 

Having that research is really important to make better recommendations as to an intervention. We know that the problem is growing, and we want the clinicians in practice to be really aware of it and to ensure that they investigate it in their patients.

What do you hope this initiative will bring to practitioners, and ultimately mean for patients?

My goal, as the president elect, is to focus on optometry being a primary eye care provider. This relationship between WCO and Alcon brings dry eye disease to the primary care mode of practice. I think this kind of effort is going to be a win-win for the patients, for the clinicians, for WCO and Alcon, to show that partnerships do benefit the patient care that is delivered on the ground.

I feel very honoured that Alcon and WCO are working together. This is an opportunity to highlight something that is a very common problem, and address it in such a way that we highlight the magnitude of people who are symptomatic.