Patient and technician perspectives following the introduction of frontloaded visual field testing in glaucoma assessment

ABSTRACT

Clinical relevance

Frontloaded visual field testing (twice per eye per session) is well-tolerated by patients and technicians, representing a viable strategy that can be implemented in routine clinical practice to capture enough clinical perimetry data for effective disease diagnosis, surveillance and management.

Background

To determine the experiences of patients and technicians following the implementation of frontloaded visual field testing (multiple tests per eye within the same session) in a glaucoma service.

Methods

This was a retrospective, cross-sectional study. A written questionnaire was administered to patients (three questions) attending the glaucoma service at the Centre for Eye Health for glaucoma assessment and to their administering perimetry technicians (two questions). The questionnaire was administered after static automated perimetry (24-2 SITA-Faster on the Humphrey Field Analyzer) was performed twice for each eye (frontloaded) within the same session. Respondents were asked to provide a 1-5 Likert scale response to questions that targeted operational issues for frontloaded visual field testing. Responses were correlated against to demographic (age, gender, ethnicity) and clinical (diagnosis, refractive error, visual field indices, test duration) parameters.

Results

Approximately 90% of patient respondents agreed that frontloaded visual field testing was clearly explained to them, that they were comfortable during the test, and would prefer completing the tests at a single visit rather than returning to repeat the test. Most technician respondents were also able to keep their patients comfortable. 13% of technician respondents felt they ran late during the session, but on average, the total test duration for four visual field tests was 13 minutes, including breaks. There was no correlation found between demographic and clinical factors, and the responses.

Conclusions

Frontloaded visual field testing was well-tolerated by patients and technicians. Strategies that may be helpful for other clinics to adopt this new paradigm are described.

KEYWORDS:

• Humphrey Field Analyzer
• SITA
• SITA-faster
• Static automated perimetry
• thresholding

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Correction

Acknowledgements

The authors also acknowledge the members of the Glaucoma Special Interest Group and clinical support services at the Centre for Eye Health.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported, in part, by an NHMRC Ideas Grant to MK and JP [1186915], and a University of New South Wales Science Early Career Academic Network Seeding Grant to JP. Guide Dogs NSW/ACT provided funding for the clinical services enabling data collection for this study. Guide Dogs NSW/ACT also provides salary support for JP and MK and support for clinical service delivery at Centre for Eye Health, from which the clinical data was derived. The funding bodies had no role in the conception or design of the study.