Advancing ophthalmology medical student education: International insights and strategies for enhanced teaching.

Overview

Enhancing medical student education in ophthalmology can lead to improved eye health care delivery and patient outcomes across all primary care and specialty disciplines. There has been a resurgence of interest in delivering high-quality ophthalmic medical student education. This educational revival is both timely and topical. A general consensus has emerged that, rather than focusing solely on increasing teaching time, strategies are needed to focus on how to optimize the limited time allotted to ophthalmology. All physicians should be prepared to provide competent and confident ophthalmic care based on exciting innovations in ophthalmic curricula content, teaching methodologies, instructional design, learning objectives, and assessment methods. We provide an update on new and innovative ophthalmic teaching and learning practices. We critically appraise and summarize novel educational strategies from around the world that can be universally applicable in enhancing ophthalmology teaching in medical school curricula. It is our hope that, although there is marginalization of ophthalmology training, these strategies can be used to further improve teaching and learning in the limited time available in medical curricula and provide an impetus for further research and innovations in teaching ophthalmology to medical students.