OHT Monitoring

1.5.2015 Update on OHT Monitoring Pathway: SaTH have advised that they will be discharging patients onto the OHT pathway from 1 May 2015, so you should therefore now see these patients filtering through to your practice.

About the OHT Pathways

This community based monitoring service will alleviate some of the issues currently facing the hospital Ophthalmology departments by transferring the monitoring of ocular hypertension to community optometry services. This will be accomplished by discharging appropriate patients, who are being maintained for regular surveillance and monitoring at Secondary Care, to the care of their community optometrist.

When a patient is identified within the secondary care service or community ophthalmology service as having OHT that can safely and effectively be managed within the community, the patient will be advised and referred to the community optometry service.

The accredited optometrist will carry out slit lamp mounted Goldmann tonometry, suprathreshold perimetry, Van Herick's test and dilated slit lamp bio-microscopic examination of the optic nerve head.

For clarity, the process of discharge is as follows, patients will be asked to choose an Optometry practice for OHT monitoring from the list of accredited practices. The chosen Optometry practice will be sent a discharge letter from SaTH, and this will include details of their last clinic appointment and timescale for the next appointment. It is the Optometry practice's responsibility to contact the patient to arrange the appointment at the appropriate time.

If a patient needs to be referred back to the glaucoma clinic after an OHT monitoring appointment, this should be treated as a new referral via the patient's GP, but it should be indicated on the referral letter that the patient has been seen via the OHT monitoring scheme.

Accreditation

Participating Optometrists must be registered with the General Optical Council and on the CCG Accredited List of Providers for this service.

Optometrists will be required to undertake the LOCSU training and accreditation package for Level 2 OHT monitoring, through WOPEC.

LOCSU codes are available from Emma Close-Davies email [email protected]