Before your consultation: how to prepare
If you are a contact lens wearer, we ask you to stop wearing your contacts for at least one week if they’re soft lenses, and four weeks if they’re hard/gas permeable lenses. This helps us to accurately assess your eye and the degree of correction required.
During the evaluation, we shall test your vision with and without your glasses. You will also be checked on a machine called an autorefractor. Other tests include:
- Contrast sensitivity
- Corneal topography (the shape and curvature of your cornea) – using 4 different methods
- Corneal thickness
- Mechanical strength of the cornea
- Eye pressures
We’ll also measure the way a wavefront of light passes through the cornea and the crystalline lens using a method known as aberrometry.
At the same time we capture details of your iris for our Advanced Controlled Eye Tracker, a tool that helps track the eye and provide accurate laser spot delivery during surgery, even with finest and fastest of eye movements.
In addition, we shall also evaluate you for dry eye. Lastly, we use special drops that dilate your pupils and paralyse your internal muscles and this allows us to both check the true power of the eye when in a relaxed state and examine the retina at the back of the eye to exclude any potential issues.
Once your surgeon has finished the assessment, they will recommend the best treatment option for you (if any) and talk you through the benefits, alternatives and risks as well as the post-operative and recovery phase.