VIDEO: Decline in ophthalmology workforce may affect access to AMD care

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Certainly, yes. Number and availability of eye doctors and retina specialists have been steadily declining since ’19, and recently, in the Journal of Ophthalmology in February of this year, it has been published that actually we expect the ophthalmology workforce to be in decline for about 12% by 2035. And this is very concerning, especially because the demand for eye care is growing because we really do have an aging population. Then the other thing that is very important, and it’s actually very disturbing, is that we still have very significant geographic disparities in health care infrastructure, but particularly in low-resource settings, the underserved communities. Health insurance coverage is also now a very great problem, along with the inadequate coverage of ophthalmic services and especially AMD treatments that are very expensive, and very frequently they actually require huge out-of-pocket expenses. Circling back to the number of retina specialists and ophthalmologists, we know how important it is to see these patients in a timely manner. If we don’t have good access to care, wait times are long, referrals are not done successfully, there are huge treatment delays, and also for the physicians themselves, we put a lot of time and effort in our clinic and on patients who actually don’t need our care. So, I do believe that some sort of triage prior to seeing retina specialists would be the best way to go.