The Ophthalmic Doctorate would be a unique qualification to encourage eye care professionals in practice to enhance their knowledge, critical awareness of current issues and to be at the forefront of their academic discipline through taught and research elements.
The taught element of the Ophthalmic Doctorate aims to allow practitioners to enhance their understanding of more advanced ophthalmic topics and to bring their knowledge up to date in evidence based eye care. The programme is designed to facilitate interdisciplinary participation so that students qualified in ophthalmology, optometry, dispensing optics and orthoptics as well as other health care professionals can study both basic and clinical visual science to a higher level. The number of taught elements taken at any time is flexible and can be accumulated over a period of five years (including completion of the research project).
The main goal is to enhance the clinical practice of eye care practitioners to enhance their level of specialisation and to enable them to better assimilate and process academic knowledge to provide evidence-based eye care to the highest level. The course also supports the research requirement of the Ophthalmic Doctorate. The taught element of the Ophthalmic Doctorate is distance learning to allow it to be conducted while the students remain in practice, with students applying the knowledge they gain from lectures to complete their assignments based on theory and evidence-based practice.
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