Gearing up for final exams

This month we welcomed Specsavers’ Professional Development team and their optometrist students preparing for OSCE exams, their final assessments. The week-long event filled our lecture areas and clinical bays – and the coffee machines were kept extra busy. 

Around 150 students and facilitators used our clinical bays for mock exams, and the other areas to brush up skills such as focimetry (checking the strength of your spectacles) and dispensing. 

The demanding assessment involves 17 tasks, drawing on any of the 75 competencies the students have developed. They take patient histories and symptoms – anything from blurred vision to headache, red eye to sudden visual loss – and either give a diagnosis or suggest further tests.

Judy Lea, Specsavers’ head of optometry development, said it was a “fantastic week of back to back Specsavers OSCE preparation courses. Thank you again to Mat Stringer and his team at ABDO NRC for all their help and hospitality and to all the facilitator team without whom these courses just wouldn’t be the same”.