Diabetic Retinopathy Screening in Europe Meeting: BUILDING ON 20 YEARS OF PROGRESS

6th National Representatives Meeting: Thursday, 5th June 2025

Conference organising committee:
Tunde Peto, Caroline Styles, Simon Harding, Sara Shields

The 6th Diabetic Retinopathy Screening in Europe meeting will be held in St. George’s Hall, Liverpool on the day before the 35th EAsDEC Annual Meeting.

This 1-day conference will be open to invited representatives of national professional organisations of diabetes and endocrinology, ophthalmology, and public health, and to policy makers and commissioners. Other colleagues wishing to attend should contact the conference secretary Sarah Shields on Sara.Shields@qub.ac.uk.

Objectives of meeting
To describe progress and lessons learnt across Europe and beyond over the 20 years since the Liverpool Declaration meeting.
To develop a further round of practical steps to address key challenges in evolving diabetic retinopathy screening programmes.

Programme
The programme will comprise plenary sessions and facilitated discussions covering the following topics. There will be time for networking.

• Current position. There has been much progress in recent years and several DR screening models have evolved. Progress across Europe and beyond will be summarised.
• Contacting and inviting the at-risk population. Global and regional initiatives have identified substantial under-detection of diabetes. A session will focus on the detection of undiagnosed diabetes, the identification of people with known diabetes and targeting high-risk groups.
• Training. Organised DR screening requires training of all personnel. The Belfast meeting identified training as a gap to be filled. Following on from that meeting currently available training materials will be summarised.
• Quality assurance. A key driver for service improvement is quality assurance, data collection, and monitoring of outcomes.
• Equipment and technology. With rapidly changing technology one session will cover practical aspects of procurement: cameras, lasers, new types of camera, OCT, AI.
• Connecting the parts of the pathway. Many programmes struggle to link all aspects of the screening pathway, losing patients at various stages.

Invited delegates will complete a questionnaire survey in these key areas.
A conference report will be produced.
We hope to be able to offer bursaries to delegates from middle-income countries.