Patient-centred care in ophthalmology: current practices, effectiveness and challenges

To summarise different patient-centred care approaches that can be used in ophthalmology and review their effectiveness.

An Entrez Pubmed search on publications concerning different patient-centred care was performed on September 7, 2021. Articles on animal research, non-English language and review articles were excluded after manually screening by two authors.

A total of 16 articles were reviewed after curation by the authors for relevance. Patient-centred care has advantages in improving disease knowledge, enhancing doctor-patient communications and improving mental well-being of patients. Various methods including intensive patient education, patient-centred communication techniques during consultations, personal disease records, education programme for caregivers, on-site ocular care for residential care home resident and shared medical appointments can be used to enhance patient-centred care.

Current strategies in patient-centred care in ophthalmology were found to be useful. However, they have not been widely practised and more studies would be required generate an evidence-based recommendation for future use.