[Ability of ophthalmic technicians to identify a normal ophthalmological examination]

Abstract

Introduction: Ophthalmology care has been growing for several years. Since ophthalmic technicians have the opportunity to perform delegated procedures, it is important to evaluate their training.

Objective: To evaluate the ability of 3rd year ophthalmic technician students and graduates to assess the normality of an ophthalmological examination and to determine a proposed time delay for seeing an ophthalmologist.

Materials and methods: One hundred records including ophthalmology examinations were shown to 8 ophthalmic technician students in their third year of study and to 3 graduated technicians. Three ophthalmologists determined the content of the files, the pathological nature or not of the case, as well as the proposed time for seeing an ophthalmologist. We calculated the sensitivity and specificity to recognize the normality of the case, as well as the concordance between the proposed time for seeing an ophthalmologist.

Results: For recognition of a normal case, the sensitivity was 80%, and the specificity was 83% in the group of technician students, and 81% versus 80% respectively in the group of graduated technicians. For the proposed time of consultation for seeing an ophthalmologist, the kappa agreement coefficient was 0.30 in the group of students and 0.41 in the group of graduates (low and moderate agreement respectively).

Conclusion: The study showed a good ability of technicians to recognize the normality or not of clinical cases, but their ability to judge the appropriate timing of treatment by an ophthalmologist remains insufficient.

Keywords: Abilities; Cas clinique; Clinical cases; Delegation; Délégation; Examen ophtalmologique; Habilités; Ophthalmological examination; Orthoptist; Orthoptiste.