Staff and Training

                                                  Staff

A Reading Centre Manager, a Specialist Advisor, three Image Graders and a Data Co-ordinator, staff the Reading Centre. The department also receives continued assistance and invaluable technical support from the IT section of the Research & Development department. Statistical support is provided to the centre by the Medical Statistics section located within R&D.

Reading Centre Advisor, Tunde Peto (MD,PhD) is an Ophthalmologist with a special interest in Epidemiology of chronic ophthalmic conditions. Dr Peto also has a Master's Degree in Pedagogical Sciences. This extensive knowledge, combined with a wide range of experience, enables her to develop training programmes for the Image Graders based within the Reading Centre.

                                              Training

The Reading Centre provides Grader training on basic anatomy and physiology of the eye, it is aimed at people from both medical and non-medical backgrounds. In addition, it provides information on the basics of clinical trial designs and standard procedures on coding and data entry.

The training is intended for those who are already involved in, or planning to be involved in, assessing and grading standard photographs of structures of the eye and consists of theoretical and hands-on training, thus every session incorporates the grading of ophthalmic photographs. It also emphasises the need for establishing normality and abnormality within a clinical trial in order to increase the validity and reproducibility of the results. This is achieved by clinically appraising scientific papers.

At the end of the training period the graders are expected to be able to recognise normal and abnormal structures within the eye. Their speciality training enables them to grade according to the latest internationally accepted grading standards.