Education and competence

Last quality assured: 07/05/2025

19-minute read

Who is this resource for?

This resource is aimed at nurses and nursing support workers across all settings and levels of practice, including students of health, social work and care professions.

Resource lead(s)

Contact details for the resource lead:

Maria

Symeonaki

Professional Lead for Midwifery and Women's Health

Contact Maria

Acknowledgements

Resource contents

Below is an interactive list of resource contents, clicking will navigate you to that resource page.

Understand more about the role of an ophthalmic nurse and the skills required to support the wellbeing of visually impaired people and those with eye conditions.

Ophthalmic nurse education is essential to provide high quality and focused evidence-based care. Bespoke education will better enable nurses to articulate concerns, as well as having informed discussions about practice, when speaking to colleagues from the wider multidisciplinary team.

The World Health Organisation (WHO, 2019) advocates the promotion of high-quality systems for eye care and the RCN Ophthalmic Nursing Forum considers the ophthalmic nursing workforce integral to those systems. WHO (2022) supports global health organisations to strategise eye care programmes, responding to increases in people requiring ophthalmic services and thus supporting and strengthening the value of effective ophthalmic patient care.