A Review of Cochrane Systematic Reviews of Interventions Relevant to Orthoptic Practice

Abstract

The systematic review process presents an important opportunity for any clinician to contribute to the establishment of reliable, evidence-based orthoptic practice. Each review has an abstract and plain language summary that many non-clinicians find useful, followed by a full copy of the review (background, objectives, methods, results, discussion) with a conclusion section that is divided into implications for practice and implications for research. The current reviews provide patients/parents/carers with information about various different conditions and treatment options, but also provide clinicians with a summary of the available evidence on interventions, to use as a guide for both clinical practice and future research planning. The reviews identified in this overview highlight the evidence available for effective interventions for strabismus, amblyopia, refractive errors, and low vision or stroke rehabilitation as well as the gaps in the evidence base. Thus, a demand exists for future robust, randomized, controlled trials of such interventions of importance in orthoptic practice.

Current Practice in Low Vision Rehabilitation of Age-related Macular Degeneration and Usefulness of Virtual Reality as a Rehabilitation Tool

“…The tendency of providers to create their own methodologies indicates a lack of accepted protocol in the field, or at least a poor awareness of clinical guidelines. Moreover, the dearth of evidence-based practice within orthoptics and optometry is not limited to France, as many other countries suffer from the same gap in low vision rehabilitation [2,4,22,[25][26][27]29,31,[61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72]. This extends further into little agreement about how best to measure low-vision rehabilitation outcomes [25].…”