Job summary
- Main area
- Retinal Screener/Grader
- Grade
- Band 4
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time - 37.5 hours per week (Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm, with routinely scheduled 11am to 7pm evening clinics. Occasional Saturdays 9am to 5pm)
- Job ref
- 196-LIS8627
- Employer
- Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- Cross-site
- Town
- Bexley, Greenwich, Bromley, Lewisham, Lambeth, Southwark
- Salary
- £30,279 - £33,116 p.a inc HCA
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 09/07/2024 23:59
- Interview date
- 18/07/2024
Employer heading
Retinal Screener Grader
Band 4
Guy’s and St Thomas’ is among the UK’s busiest and most successful NHS foundation trusts. We provide a full range of hospital and community services for people in south London and as well as specialist care for patients from further afield including cancer, renal, orthopaedic, respiratory and cardiovascular services.
Guy’s is home to the largest dental school in Europe and a £160 million Cancer Centre opened in 2016. As part of our commitment to provide care closer to home, in 2017 we also opened a cancer centre and a kidney treatment centre at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup. St Thomas’ has one of the largest critical care units in the UK and one of the busiest emergency departments in London. It is also home to Evelina London Children’s Hospital.
Evelina London cares for local children in Lambeth and Southwark and provides specialist services across south east England including cardiac, renal and critical care services. We lead a number of specialist service networks aiming to ensure children are treated locally where possible, but have access to specialist expertise when they need it. Our community services include health visiting, school nursing and support for families of children with long-term conditions.
Our adult community services teams deliver care at the heart of the local communities we serve, working in partnership with GPs, local authorities and other healthcare and voluntary sector organisations. Working with our partners in Lambeth and Southwark, we are focusing on new ways of working to improve care for local patients.
In February 2021 the Royal Brompton and Harefield joined Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, bringing together world-leading expertise in the care and research of heart and lung disease. Our merger provides a once in a generation opportunity to build a lasting, world-renowned heart and lung centre, providing the highest quality care for patients and conducting world-leading research.
We have a reputation for clinical excellence and high quality teaching and research. We are part of King’s Health Partners, one of eight accredited UK academic health sciences centres. In partnership with King’s College London we have dedicated clinical research facilities including an MHRA accredited Phase I clinical trials unit.
Patients are at the heart of everything we do and we pride ourselves on ensuring the best possible patient experience as well as safe, high quality care. We are proud to have one of the lowest mortality rates in the NHS. Following a comprehensive Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection in 2019 we maintained our overall rating of ‘good’. Our adult community services achieved a rating of ‘outstanding’.
The commitment of our 23,500 staff is key to our success. We are one of the largest local employers and we aim to develop and support all our staff so they are able to deliver high quality, safe and efficient care. The 2019 NHS staff survey results show that we have one of the most engaged and motivated workforces in the NHS. We know this has a positive impact on the care provided to our patients.
We have one of the most ambitious capital investment programmes anywhere in the NHS.
Job overview
An exciting opportunity has arisen for a qualified Retinal Screener Grader to join the South East London Diabetic Eye Screening Programme, provided by Guy's and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. The service is one of the largest eye screening programmes in the country, responsible for providing screening to over 100,000 patients.
Screening is delivered in hospital outpatient clinics, NHS health centres, GP practices and high street opticians. All locations are accessible by public transport, applicants do not need to hold a driving licence.
The successful candidate must hold the national qualification in diabetic eye screening (City and Guilds or Health Screeners diploma) and should be a confident and experienced grader with experience working at Primary and Secondary level grading.
Experience in capturing OCT images would be an advantage but not essential.
Excellent customer care and communication skills are essential for this post. You will be self-disciplined, focused and able to manage clinics independently providing the highest quality care to our patients.
We pride ourselves on the quality of our grading training and the successful candidate will be supported to develop their DR and non-DR grading skills, with the aim of progressing to Arbitration and ROG level grading and band 5 roles.
Main duties of the job
Running Diabetic Eye Screening Clinics:
- Pre-assesing patients, including taking Visual Acuity
- Capturing relevant medical history
- Instilling eye drops
- Capturing retinal photographs and OCT scans
- Grading retinal photographs
Further information on the role and its requirements can be found in the attached job description and person specification documentation
Working for our organisation
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is commissioned by NHS England to provide the Diabetic Eye Screening Programme across South East London.
Our screening clinics are operated from several hospital and community sites across the sector, with our administration, management and grading centre based on the Guy’s Hospital Campus. We have very close links with both ophthalmology and diabetes departments, aiming to provide an integrated and patient focused screening service.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
The post holder will undertake diabetic eye screening on patients with diabetes across a variety of screening sites in the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham, Bexley, Bromley and Greenwich. This includes:
- taking a brief symptoms and history
- measuring visual acuity,
- instilling dilating eye drops,
- capturing high quality digital retinal images
- grading digital retinal images to secondary level
The post holder will be responsible for updating the screening database with the patient’s demographic details, visual acuity and any other relevant information.
The post holder will also be expected to monitor the grading queues to ensure grading is completed to ensure timely notification of results and onward referral where appropriate.
The post holder will have regular contact with:
- Multi-disciplinary members of the diabetes departments at the acute hospital sites within the 6 boroughs of London covered by the programme.
- Members of the programme administration team
- Screening Team Leader
- Programme Manager
- Clinical Lead, and Lead Ophthalmologists
Clinical Duties and Responsibilities
- Greet patients courteously and explain the screening process from assessment to reporting of results;
- work constructively with colleagues to ensure clinics operate smoothly;
- confirm and update patient demographics on the patient’s screening record;
- instil mydriatic eye drops into the patient’s eyes, in line with appropriate protocols, recording this information on the IT system;
- capture digital retinal images of patients’ eyes using retinal screening cameras available at the different screening sites;
- grade retinal images to secondary level, making an assessment of the level of disease in line with local grading protocol;
- identify and refer significant non diabetic related pathology;
- ensure R3 (proliferative diabetic retinopathy) is appropriately fast tracked through the grading pathway and to ophthalmology;
- respond to requests from administration team or diabetes staff to add additional patients to the list and “walk” them into appointment slots;
- refer any issues preventing patients being screened on that day to the administration team so that they can rearrange appointments and record this in the patient notes;
- ensure the daily clinic list is kept up to date;
- deal with any telephone and drop in enquires, providing information to patients and colleagues that is commensurate with training and referring any clinical queries to the team leader or clinical lead;
- use the retinal camera to gain good quality anterior and peripheral images of patients eyes where appropriate;
- adjust the camera settings appropriately, and troubleshoot any camera/hardware issues that arise before reporting any problems up the line;
- To be confident with the use of the IT system, finding patients, adding new patients, updating patients and archiving patients in line with screening and administration policies.
Further information on the role and its requirements can be found in the attached job description and person specification documentation
Person specification
Knowledge / Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Good standard of general education, 5 GCSES A-C or equivalent
- City and Guilds NVQ Level 3 Diploma in Diabetic Retinopathy Screening or Health Screeners Diploma including grading modules.
Experience
Essential criteria
- Experience of managing busy retinal screening clinics
- Experience of grading digital retinal images at primary and secondary level
Desirable criteria
- Experience of working in a clinical ophthalmology setting
- Experience of grading at Arbitration level
Skills
Essential criteria
- Ability to prioritise multiple competing tasks
- understanding of internal quality assurance within a retinal screening programme
- Excellent computer literacy
Employer certification / accreditation badges
Applicant requirements
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Nathan Hayne
- Job title
- Screening Operations Manager
- Email address
- [email protected]
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