Awareness of Evidence Based Contact Lens Practice among Optometry Undergraduate Students. A Pilot Study

Abstract

Purpose: Evidence-based practice is one of the most crucial aspects in the field of optometry. The Purpose of this study is to access the basic awareness of evidence-based practice in optometry along with their integral implementation of evidence-based practice in contact lens subject.

Method:  For that a Contact lens evidence-based practice awareness questionnaire was created with the method of focus group discussion with 11 specialists in contact lens and EBP. This questionnaire is implemented to 25 optometry students and accessed their awareness and skill in contact lens.

Result: Out of 25 students 92% were females and 8% were males. The overall reliability of the questionnaire is 0.912. Most of the students are coming under the categories of mild (20%) and intermediate (24%) level of knowledge in evidence-based practice. Even though 24% of the students marked in high level knowledge in EBP remaining 76% are not aware about the EBP practice.

Conclusion:  Lack of knowledge in evidence-based practice will affect the students critical thinking ability, self-learning skill and clinical reasoning. So, implementation of evidence-based practice in the syllabus of optometry education in India is major change that needed.