Summary
Ronald Kam has been a substantively appointed Consultant Ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital since 2018 and also a consultant (silmätautien erikoislääkäri) at Helsinki University Hospital since January 2024. He is a subspecialist surgeon in the fields of glaucoma and cataract, and is an experienced trainer of eye specialists in complex glaucoma and cataract surgical techniques. He has trained numerous international consultant colleagues in glaucoma surgery from scratch. He is a registered specialist in both UK and Finland.
He qualified from the Imperial College School of Medicine in 2008 and was appointed as an Honorary Clinical Lecturer in the Department of Surgery and Cancer there the year after. His ophthalmic specialist training was based in London, rotating through Hillingdon Hospital, the Western Eye Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital, where he gained clinical and hands-on surgical experience in all ophthalmic subspecialties. This was followed by two years of fellowship training specifically in paediatric and adult glaucoma at Moorfields.
He has won a patient safety award from the Royal Society of Medicine for surgical safety innovation and his team has received a commendation from a UK-wide awards programme for improvements to emergency eye treatment of endophthalmitis.
His research studies have spanned wide-ranging areas, including intensive care medicine and ophthalmology. He has experience of turning his own clinical questions into concise research studies. For example, during his intensive care medicine training, wondering whether low blood pressure episodes could be related to kidney replacement therapy, he designed and carried out fluid dynamics research in collaboration with the bioengineering department of Imperial College to show that this was indeed the case, and that it could be avoided by ensuring central venous catheter infusion and haemodialysis aspiration ports are sufficiently far apart. This knowledge continues to help improve safety for critically ill patients in a specialty he has left over a decade ago. His most recent research activity was a national surveillance study with the British Ophthalmic Surveillance Unit (BOSU) showing that the incidence of severe visual loss (wipe-out) following procedurally uncomplicated cataract surgery is actually extremely rare, around 3 in a million. This has helped reassure both patients with glaucoma and their eye surgeons that the benefits of cataract removal should not be withheld from patients for fear of visual wipe-out.
Publications
Journals
Ramsden C, Shweikh Y, Kam R, et al. , 2023, Estimating the rate of severe visual loss (wipe-out) following cataract surgery, a British Ophthalmological Surveillance Unit (BOSU) study., Eye (lond), Vol:37, Pages:3787-3792
Serebryanska T, Kam KY, 2018, Rolling out emergency treatment boxes for bacterial endophthalmitis, The Pharmaceutical Journal, ISSN:0031-6873
Kam KYR, Muhundhakumar D, Barton K, et al. , 2018, Re: Lim et al.: XEN implant-related endophthalmitis (Ophthalmology. 2018;125:209)., Ophthalmology, Vol:125