Conference season, and why continuing education is not optional

Late July brings the densest part of the professional calendar. The Nigerian Postgraduate College of Optometrists holds its annual conference on 27 and 28 July, and the African Council of Optometry meets alongside the national conference from 29 July into the first week of August.

For members the practical questions are logistics. This note is about why the obligation exists at all, which is worth restating occasionally.

What has changed in a decade

A practitioner who qualified ten years ago and has not kept up would be missing, among other things:

Myopia control. A decade ago the standard response to a child's rising prescription was a stronger lens. There is now a substantial evidence base for interventions that slow axial elongation — specialised spectacle lens designs, soft lenses for myopia control, orthokeratology, low-concentration atropine. This has changed what good paediatric practice looks like, and it matters because the prescription a child ends up with determines their lifetime risk of retinal disease.

Dry eye. The shift from treating it as a tear volume problem to recognising that most of it is evaporative and driven by meibomian gland dysfunction has changed management substantially. Practitioners still reaching first for artificial tears are treating the less common mechanism.

Imaging. Optical coherence tomography has moved from a tertiary instrument to something present in many practices, and reading it well is a learned skill that changes glaucoma and retinal management.

Glaucoma. Evidence supporting laser trabeculoplasty as a first-line option, rather than only after drops have failed, alters the conversation at diagnosis.

Blue light. The accumulated trial evidence has not supported the claims, and a profession that had been selling filtering lenses on those claims has had to adjust.

None of that is exotic. It is ordinary practice, and it has moved.

What conferences are actually for

The lectures are the advertised content, and they matter. But the value that does not appear in the programme is the corridor conversation — the case you have been unsure about, discussed with three colleagues who have seen it before; the referral relationship formed with somebody you now know by name; the honest comparison of how different practices handle a problem you thought was yours alone.

Private practice is isolating. A day spent with people doing the same work is worth something distinct from the CPD points attached to it.

The equipment question

Trade exhibitions attract a fair amount of scepticism, some of it deserved. But they are the practical way to handle instruments before committing capital to them, to compare what is actually available in Nigeria rather than in a brochure, and to ask suppliers about service and parts — which in this market matters at least as much as the specification.

For members

Registration details for both conferences circulate through the national body and the zonal secretaries. The chapter's own Continuing Education Series continues through the year alongside them, and zonal meetings resume in August.

The full chapter calendar is on this site's events page.