Dr Colin Parsloe with technician Michaela Deed

Dry eye disease (DED) specialist Dr Colin Parsloe, clinical advisor to the New Zealand Dry Eye Association, is bringing advanced management of complex dry eye to the Bay of Plenty and Tauranga Eye Specialists’ Papamoa clinic.

Passionate about helping fellow DED sufferers, Dr Parsloe has 20 years’ personal experience in managing complex DED and was a co-author of the Tear Film & Ocular Surface Society (TFOS) DEWS II report. “I’m looking to support my very skilled and amazing optometrist colleagues with the complex cases, the stubborn dry eye,” he said. “I want to see the difficult cases they are struggling to manage, where they want to ensure we have the right diagnosis and where I can offer the patient treatments the optometrists don’t have access to, like cyclosporine, autologous serum and foetal cord blood serum.”

About 20% of an optometrist's dry eye practice is going to be quite severe, Dr Parsloe said. “Either the patients don’t respond to the normal treatments, or they’ve had the level-one treatments and the level-two treatments and need to step up. If you've been treating a patient intensively for dry eyes and in four months’ time they're not getting better, I'm here to help. I can do any necessary surgical interventions, the advanced diagnostics and treatments, then I'll pass the patient back to the optometrist for ongoing care.”

Unfortunately, treatment of dry eye is largely a self-funded service as it is very difficult to get insurance coverage and the public threshold for treatment is too high, Dr Parsloe said. “Severe dry eye is a chronic disease and 99.9% of patients, we can't cure. They must get their head around this being a permanent, painful condition and, sadly, they have to set aside time and money for it.”

Dealing with chronic pain is emotionally and mentally draining and these patients have tried everything, he said. “The ones I see are not the ones with a bit of computer dry eye – you blink and your eyes are sore and you rub your eyes, you feel better. These are patients with salt in their eyes every day from when they wake up to when they go to sleep.”

Dr Parsloe’s protocolised approach to DED management is closely linked to DEWS III and was developed over two decades of practice, primarily in the UK. Optometrists can refer via nzdry.com.