Current Projects

Our project aims to calculate the rates of current and projected service provision and service needs for ophthalmology subspecialties and characterise the distribution of this across rural and metropolitan WA. Ophthalmologists across WA will be surveyed on their current practice. This data, along with WA population data will be used to construct a health economics model. The findings of this study will be essential in informing policy and fellowship incentives to address subspecialty shortages.

Junior doctors interested in making a difference to global health may often be discouraged by a lack of experience or expertise, particularly in a highly specialised field like ophthalmology. This prompted Qiang Li and Elaine Ong to establish the John Fawcett Foundation ‘CREATE’ Program (JFF CREATE), a new volunteering initiative that inspires like-minded Australian and Indonesian junior doctors to fight global blindness through six fundamental endeavours: Charity, Research, Exchange, Awareness-building, Tutelage, and Empowerment.

Eye injuries are a leading cause of blindness and impaired quality of life globally. In Australia, over 10,000 people are hospitalised each year due to eye injuries costing the healthcare system $1.89 billion (AUD) annually. Children, rural residents and First Nations people are especially vulnerable. For this project, we will 1) research why certain demographics are more vulnerable to eye injuries and their devastating consequences, and 2) develop an evidence-based preventive program for dissemination in Western Australia. The desired outcome of our project is to minimise the impact of eye injuries on Western Australians’ health.

This study will create a corneal infection image database (AusKeratitisID) for subsequent training and evaluation of a type of artificial intelligence, deep learning models, with clinical data for automated image-based differentiation of bacterial, fungal and viral keratitis to assist in the rapid diagnosis to prevent vision loss.