Access to culturally safe health services is a basic human right, however through the lasting effects of colonisation, oppression, and systemic racism, the individual and community health of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have been severely impacted. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Cultural Safety Strategy of the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency, and the Standards of Cultural Competence and Cultural Safety of the Optometrists and Dispensing Opticians Board of New Zealand, recognise the importance of access to safe health care for Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori patients, which encompasses both clinical competency and cultural safety. Universities have an ongoing responsibility to ensure their learning and teaching activities result in graduates being able to provide culturally safe practice. This article highlights the emergence of culturally safe practices in the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand optometry curricula over the last five years incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing into the curricula, understanding the local Indigenous histories and contexts, the adoption of online cultural education modules, and clinical placement partnerships with local Indigenous communities. Whilst there is still much work to do to achieve the goal of graduating culturally safe optometrists, this paper focuses on features that enable or impede progress in the development of culturally safe practices within the optometry programmes to improve eye health equity for Indigenous recognise the diversity of Indigenous cultures across Australia and NZ.

Objective: Rural residents face numerous barriers to accessing eye care services that contribute to disparities in eye health outcomes. This study aimed to explore the perspectives of the rural workforce on opportunities to improve patient access to eye care services, as well as understand the ways the workforce can be supported.Setting: Regional, rural and remote Western Australia.Design: A qualitative descriptive approach was taken. Maximum variation and snowball sampling were used, and semi‐structured interviews were conducted until data saturation. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using inductive thematic analysis.Participants: Seventeen semi‐structured interviews were conducted with six ophthalmologists, 10 optometrists and one non‐clinician involved in delivering eye care services in rural Western Australia.Results: Four major themes were identified. ‘Access to care’ pertained to barriers and facilitators of timely and appropriate eye care for rural residents. ‘Need for collaborative care framework’ between ophthalmology and optometry emerged as a key opportunity to decrease wait times and maximise efficiency of visiting services. ‘Motivation to work in rural settings’ and ‘challenges of working in rural settings’ suggested opportunities to support the workforce.Conclusion: This study finds that continued support through financial, personal, and professional means is important for workforce retention and satisfaction among eye care service providers in rural Western Australia. Although collaborative care models currently exist, the extent of collaboration between practitioners varies considerably. Further research is required on developing innovative, scalable and sustainable models of care to meet the eye care needs in rural Australia.

Deep learning (DL) represents a paradigm-shifting, burgeoning field of research with emerging clinical applications in optometry. Unlike traditional programming, which relies on human-set specific rules, DL works by exposing the algorithm to a large amount of annotated data and allowing the software to develop its own set of rules (i.e. learn) by adjusting the parameters inside the model (network) during a training process in order to complete the task on its own. One major limitation of traditional programming is that, with complex tasks, it may require an extensive set of rules to accurately complete the assignment. Additionally, traditional programming can be susceptible to human bias from programmer experience. With the dramatic increase in the amount and the complexity of clinical data, DL has been utilised to automate data analysis and thus to assist clinicians in patient management. This review will present the latest advances in DL, for managing posterior eye diseases as well as DL-based solutions for patients with vision loss.

The objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is used extensively in health and medical education to assess clinical competence. While OSCEs are not primarily designed for individual feedback, they provide an opportunity to generate meaningful and constructive feedback that students can use to reflect on areas of weakness (and strength). The most timely and effective way to incorporate individual feedback following a summative OSCE continues to be explored. This paper describes a novel OSCE feedback model which uses readily available summative assessment data to calculate 10% index scores. This provides information about relative station difficulty and relative individual student performance. An individualised feedback report was provided to every student after the OSCEs. This enables identification of stronger and weaker performance areas and composite skills, which can be utilised by all students to direct future learning. Providing timely, individual actionable feedback to every student following a summative OSCE is possible without impacting the examination process or examiner burden. A study is planned to determine the utilisation of this feedback by students and it's impact as a qualitative self-assessment exercise.

The global prevalence of myopia has increased significantly in recent decades, and it is anticipated that half the population of the world will be myopic by 2050. The dramatic increase in myopia cannot be explained solely by genetic factors; hence, environmental factors such as near work may play an important role in myopia development. Near work activities involve accommodation, convergence, and pupil constriction, which lead to various mechanical changes that alter the structural and optical properties of the anterior eye. Mechanical changes associated with near work activities include ciliary body contraction, medial rectus contraction, lateral rectus relaxation, changes in the eyelid-cornea interaction, pupil size, and crystalline lens shape and position. These structural variations lead to optical changes including a change in spherical refractive power, astigmatism, accommodative convergence, higher order aberrations, and retinal image quality. Several differences in near work-related optical and structural changes have been observed between myopes and non-myopes. These differences elucidate mechanisms that potentially underpin near work-associated axial elongation and myopia development. This narrative review explores anterior segment structural and optical changes during near work and their potential mechanistic contribution to myopia development, while highlighting literature gaps that require further research.