Introduction

The Video Atlas of Eye Surgery is the unique result of a collaborative endeavour between an international group of experienced ophthalmologists who are committed teachers. Many of them are respected innovators who lecture and run instruction courses at national and international level.

Concept

The concept has been to pool their collective experience to provide a comprehensive and balanced training resource for learning and teaching eye surgery. The material in the Video Atlas has been built from the ground up expressly for this purpose.

To this end, the subject matter has been carefully chosen and structured with the specific intention of integrating it into postgraduate training programs. This has been our constructive response to the changing environment of postgraduate medical education, in which most of us find ourselves today, where the traditional one-to-one apprenticeship is becoming difficult to sustain. We are faced with the challenge of maintaining the high quality of training required with sufficient breadth and depth but against the background of diminishing time and resources available to achieve this. We simply have to develop innovative educational tools and techniques to make more efficient and effective use of the training opportunities in order to produce competent doctors. The Video Atlas is our attempt at contributing to this solution for Eye Surgery.

Throughout the production of the Video Atlas we have used highest quality digital video clips and selected the best of them from an archive of thousands of hours or recorded footage purposefully filmed over many years. We have taken this source material, combined it with custom built graphics and 3D animations and then edited it over tightly scripted voice-overs. The end product is a highly structured educational package whose content consists entirely of professionally produced self-contained movies.

The movies are accessed through a custom-built interactive application on a cross-platform DVD. The application includes unique features such as the “Learning Pad” onto which selected clips of movies can be stacked and then grouped in any chosen sequence and played back with or without sound for use in lecturing or small-group teaching. The electronic medium not only allows the potential for remote access of this material but also facilitates regular updating and the inclusion of formal assessment programs to enable auditable training.