Background

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust with its partner The Institute of Ophthalmology has, as part of its Joint Research Strategy, identified the need for a Reading Centre.

Currently the development of trials recognised by the external peer review process as being of high quality has been hampered by our inability to develop robust outcome measures. This in turn as been restricted by lack of accurate phenotyping. To date trial outcomes have relied on the ad hoc recognition of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ in cross sectional surveys, and the local development of methods for identifying change as the result of any therapeutic intervention.

We believed that a Reading Centre was essential to optimise the use made of our patient base, by creating robust outcomes from survey work as well as therapeutic trials. Because of the size of the projected workload, it was appropriate to site this at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Trust.

The Reading Centre will enable standard definition of ‘disease’ and ‘abnormality’ to be made. The centre will establish the range in measurement variability that in turn would allow the development of measurement data and the recognition of change.