Humanising health care: Sharing real life patient stories about vision impairment and depression with eye care students 

When asked which sense they would be most scared to lose, nearly 75% of people said their sight. It’s not hard to understand why. Most of us rely on our sight for our daily routines, learning, work and hobbies.

As a mental health researcher at Cardiff University, I’m particularly interested in understanding how sight loss affects an individual’s emotional wellbeing. For the last 15 years I have been researching ways to support the mental health of blind and partially sighted people via NHS, social care and charity sector services.

In my job at the university’s Centre for Trials Research, I am the Academic Lead for Public Involvement & Engagement. This means that I support our staff in involving the public (including patients) in planning and conducting our research. It’s vital that people with lived experience of a condition are part of our team, as they are the people our research will help; they make sure that we are answering the most relevant research questions.

Members of the public can also play an important role in educating our next generation of healthcare professionals. My previous research showed that whilst experiencing depression is common for individuals with vision impairment, the majority of low vision practitioners (optometrists & dispensing opticians) in Wales did not try to identify or discuss this issue with patients. Depression can interfere with effective vision rehabilitation and add to the disability of sight loss, so it is important that is addressed.

These findings lead to my latest project which I recently presented at the Women in Vision Conference in Bristol (November 2024). My talk explained the goal of my work, which was to create learning resources for undergraduate eye care students (optometrists and dispensing opticians) to educate them about depression and how to discuss it with patients.

I envisaged it would be much powerful for students to hear directly from patients: I interviewed four wonderful people who recounted their struggles with depression, their recovery and how eye care practitioners can help. With the assistance of Orchard, a local production company, we condensed each story down to 5 minutes of key messages for students.

The film clips were shared with educators on 8 eye care courses across the UK and shown to students in the 2024-25 academic year. Feedback from 234 students suggests they had an increased awareness of patients’ perspectives and experiences and they would be more likely to communicate about mental health and refer, signpost or offer support.

I was delighted to win the conference prize for Best Oral Presentation and to receive positive feedback and interest from ophthalmology, optometry and third sector colleagues. It was an ideal opportunity to raise awareness of the prevalence of poor mental health in blind and partially sighted people, to showcase the involvement of patients in education & research and to encourage colleagues to use our resources. They can be shared on request from nollettcl@cardiff.ac.uk

The full academic paper gives more details of the project.

With thanks to the service users at Camsight, my co-researcher Prof Keziah Latham, the Women in Vision organising committee, the College of Optometry for a travel bursary and the award sponsors.