17 March 2023

Healthcare Science Week - Meet Pete Toomey


This week is Healthcare Science Week - which celebrates the invaluable contribution healthcare scientists make to patient care. Pete Toomey talks about being a Clinical Scientist and Service Manager in Ophthalmic Imaging...

  • Healthcare scientists play a big role in patient care and are involved in 80 per cent of all clinical decisions made in the NHS
  • Pete Toomey, Clinical Scientist and Service Manager in Ophthalmic Imaging, chose his career because several of his family members had eye conditions.
  • He now provides and manages the diagnostic service for ophthalmology across four hospital sites.

Healthcare scientists play a big role in patient care and are involved in 80 per cent of all clinical decisions made in the NHS. Meet Pete Toomey, Clinical Scientist and Service Manager in Ophthalmic Imaging...

I provide and manage the diagnostic service for ophthalmology across four hospital sites, including the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, the Northern General Eye Centre and the Eye Imaging Hub as well as at Sheffield Children's Hospital.

I joined the ophthalmic department straight out of university as an ophthalmic technician. I picked ophthalmology as several of my family have eye conditions and I had attended appointments with them and was fascinated by the investigations they had.

Our service has grown significantly over the past decade, and we now perform over 100,000 investigations annually.

We provide over 30 different types of investigations including retinal scans to help monitor conditions like age-related macular degeneration, biometry (measurement of eye for cataract surgery), ultrasound to help with the management of conditions such as retinal detachments and ocular oncology. We also perform retinal screening on premature babies to ensure the retina is developing correctly. Each of our sites is very different, and clinics can be extremely busy and fast-paced.

The range of diagnostics we provide varies greatly as does the length of time a test takes. Some tests like corneal scans can be carried out in 5 to 10 minutes, while other investigations like angiograms (where we use a special dye to highlight the blood vessels as the dye moves through them) can take up to 30 to 40 minutes. Ensuring we have good reliable investigations is paramount to allow the highest quality of patient care.

Over the last few years, the department has taken on a number of extended roles – including glaucoma reporting, diabetic reporting age-related macular degeneration reporting and reporting on cataracts following surgery. This role expansion provides exciting new roles for the team who are all very keen to learn and develop and love new challenges.

Providing healthcare to patients is extremely rewarding, and our diagnostic work aids diagnosis, guiding the treatment that helps people maintain sight. Within the role you will often see patients attending for several years and get to know them very well. One of the patient groups that we see frequently is those with age-related macular degeneration.
As well as monitoring changes to the central vision that indicate where more treatment needs to be given, the extended roles we have taken on, where we give intravitreal eye injections, also hopefully help stabilise age-related macular degeneration.

The opening of the 'Eye Imaging Hub' in the Covid pandemic made it possible for us to continue to provide eye imaging diagnostic testing in very challenging circumstances. The site now provides around 25% of our total diagnostics, and has created a better more efficient patient experience for those patients who have booked diagnostic only appointments. Previously, these patients were all seen at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital and we sometimes had long queues of patients waiting for ‘imaging only appointments’ alongside those who were being seen in clinic. It was lot of hard work to get the service up and running but patient questionnaires show that the Eye Imaging Hub is a much-valued service.

 



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