Author Block: Jeffrey Matthew Mah, Lorne Bellan, Stephanie Baxter

Author Disclosure Block: J.M. Mah: None. L. Bellan: Any direct financial payments including receipt of honoraria; Manitoba Optometry Association (Guest speaker at AGM), University of Ottawa (Consultant for search for new department head). S. Baxter: Funded grants or clinical trials; National Institutes of Health (Part of a multicentre NIH trial called ZEDS. The nature of the funding is to pay for patient/physician participation and associated study expenses).

Abstract Body:

Purpose: In recent years, concerns have been raised about the adequacy of ophthalmology education in Canadian medical schools. In order to identify avenues to improve undergraduate ophthalmology training, it is necessary to have an understanding of the current curricula in Canadian medical schools. The last study to comprehensively describe undergraduate ophthalmology training in Canada was conducted over 20 years ago. The objectives of this study were (1) to quantify the amount of mandatory ophthalmology training currently provided in pre-clerkship and clerkship in Canadian medical schools, (2) to further describe the training provided in terms of style of teaching and content.

Methods: An online survey was distributed via email to undergraduate ophthalmology program representatives at each of the 17 Canadian medical schools. Follow-up was performed with repeat emails and phone calls when required. Means and standard deviations were used to describe normally distributed variables and medians and interquartile ranges were used for variables with non-normal distributions.

Results: The survey was completed by 14 of 17 Canadian medical schools (82%). The median number of hours devoted to ophthalmology in pre-clerkship was 20 with considerable variability between schools (range 0-100). The most common teaching style in pre-clerkship was lecture followed by clinical experience and small group/problem-based learning. Seven schools (50%) offered an ophthalmology rotation as part of the core clerkship, however the percentage of students at those schools who participated in the rotation was variable (median 100%, range 10%-100%). The most common duration was 1 week (median 1 week, range 0.2 weeks - 4 weeks) and the most common teaching settings were general clinics and emergency clinics. Twelve of 14 schools covered all of the five ophthalmology-related Medical Council of Canada (MCC) learning objectives of eye redness, strabismus and amblyopia, acute vision loss, chronic vision loss, and diplopia. One school covered all but diplopia and the final school did not over any of the five.

Conclusions: The amount of curricular time devoted to ophthalmology in Canadian medical schools has remained stable over the past 20 years and the five ophthalmology-related MCC learning objectives are being addressed well. However, the majority of Canadian medical students are not being exposed to ophthalmology in a clinical environment. The effectiveness of ophthalmology undergraduate education could potentially be improved by adopting a short, standardized ophthalmology clinical rotation in clerkship.