Improving access and safety in eye surgery
By promoting standardized regulatory oversight across all provinces, ACCESS aims to ensure that both insured and uninsured procedures are delivered in high-quality, accredited facilities—regardless of location.
Delivery of care innovation
Immediate Sequential Bilateral Intraocular lens surgery is performed worldwide providing patients with the benefits of less recovery time, and fewer visits with healthcare providers enabling more patients to be seen and reduce national wait times for surgery.
Members of ACCESS provided education on the safety of bilateral surgery resulting in the removal regulatory barriers in British Columbia ensuring this global standard of practice could be offered to patients.
Safer surgery
Rapid advancements in understanding how to prevent Toxic Anterior Segment Syndrome in routine Intraocular surgery are often discovered and become standard of practice before regulators and manufacturers can update regulatory standards.
Members of ACCESS advocated to the Canadian Standards Association to ensure these regulatory standards were updated based on scientific data. The result ensures healthcare providers can offer the safest surgical environment by not being forced to follow outdated regulatory requirements.
Access to healthcare
Regulatory standards meant to protect patients can sometimes be applied broadly creating accessibility barriers to healthcare.
While Body Mass Index (BMI) is an effective tool to screen patients for potential health risks, it does not always provide an accurate or holistic view of a patient’s overall health.
Members of ACCESS provided education on BMI to help remove accessibility barriers to patients seeking certain ophthalmic surgeries in British Columbia.