Retinal Screener Grader

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a qualified Retinal Screener Grader to join the South East London Diabetic Eye Screening Programme, provided by Guy's and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. The service is one of the largest eye screening programmes in the country, responsible for providing screening to over 100,000 patients.

Screening is delivered in hospital outpatient clinics, NHS health centres, GP practices and high street opticians. All locations are accessible by public transport, applicants do not need to hold a driving licence.

Experience in capturing OCT images would be an advantage but not essential.

Excellent customer care and communication skills are essential for this post. You will be self-disciplined, focused and able to manage clinics independently providing the highest quality care to our patients.

**Running Diabetic Eye Screening Clinics**:

- Pre-assesing patients, including taking Visual Acuity
- Capturing relevant medical history
- Instilling eye drops
- Capturing retinal photographs and OCT scans
- Grading retinal photographs

Further information on the role and its requirements can be found in the attached job description and person specification documentation

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is commissioned by NHS England to provide the Diabetic Eye Screening Programme across South East London.

Our screening clinics are operated from several hospital and community sites across the sector, with our administration, management and grading centre based on the Guy’s Hospital Campus. We have very close links with both ophthalmology and diabetes departments, aiming to provide an integrated and patient focused screening service.

The post holder will undertake diabetic eye screening on patients with diabetes across a variety of screening sites in the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham, Bexley, Bromley and Greenwich. This includes:
1. taking a brief symptoms and history
2. measuring visual acuity,
3. instilling dilating eye drops,
4. capturing high quality digital retinal images
5. grading digital retinal images to secondary level

The post holder will be responsible for updating the screening database with the patient’s demographic details, visual acuity and any other relevant information.

The post holder will also be expected to monitor the grading queues to ensure grading is completed to ensure timely notification of results and onward referral where appropriate.

**The post holder will have regular contact with**:

- Multi-disciplinary members of the diabetes departments at the acute hospital sites within the 6 boroughs of London covered by the programme.
- Members of the programme administration team
- Screening Team Leader
- Programme Manager
- Clinical Lead, and Lead Ophthalmologists

Clinical

**Responsibilities**:

- Greet patients courteously and explain the screening process from assessment to reporting of results;
- work constructively with colleagues to ensure clinics operate smoothly;
- confirm and update patient demographics on the patient’s screening record;
- instil mydriatic eye drops into the patient’s eyes, in line with appropriate protocols, recording this information on the IT system;
- capture digital retinal images of patients’ eyes using retinal screening cameras available at the different screening sites;
- grade retinal images to secondary level, making an assessment of the level of disease in line with local grading protocol;
- identify and refer significant non diabetic related pathology;
- ensure R3 (proliferative diabetic retinopathy) is appropriately fast tracked through the grading pathway and to ophthalmology;
- respond to requests from administration team or diabetes staff to add additional patients to the list and “walk” them into appointment slots;
- refer any issues preventing patients being screened on that day to the administration team so that they can rearrange appointments and record this in the patient notes;
- ensure the daily clinic list is kept up to date;
- deal with any telephone and drop in enquires, providing information to patients and colleagues that is commensurate with training and referring any clinical queries to the team leader or clinical lead;
- use the retinal camera to gain good quality anterior and peripheral images of patients eyes where appropriate;
- adjust the camera settings appropriately, and troubleshoot any camera/hardware issues that arise before reporting any problems up the line;
- To be confident with the use of the IT system, finding patients, adding new patients, updating patients and archiving patients in line with screening and administration policies.

Further information on the role and its requirements can be found in the attached job description and person specification documentation