Great Ormond St or Moorfields?

[skewiff]

DS has been going go Moorfields eye hospital for about 2 years now. He's 4 and has a squint.

I have been unhappy with the care there since the beginning - largely because they are always sooo negative and every time we get a different person and each professional always has a very different opinion. Every time I come out feeling very sad and very confused. They are also not great at dealing with DS (and therefore children in my opinion).

Are any of you taking your children to Great Ormond St for their eyes? And if so what has your experience been there?

I'm wondering whether it is worth changing.

If you're not happy its worth getting a second opinion. I've never referred to Great Ormond Street for a squint before, usually its Western Eye Hospital or Moorfields.
Eye care professionals usually do have different opinions - but with a squint it should be fairly straighforward. What kind of squint does your son have?

Well - he has a convergent squint - I think its called. Where the eye goes in. He is affected on his left side with cerebral palsy and so it used to be mostly his left eye that was going inwards. Now I think it is both and often it seems to be more his right.

However when I saw the doctors yesterday they would not confirm this with me at all. They seemed really vague and unsure. They said it was a very mild squint and these are hard to treat.

At first an optomotrist did all the eye patching stuff and his left eye appeared to have deteriorated hugely. I insisted that DS was playing us up and she seemed to be really fed up and in a hurry and not believing me. I asked to see someone else and they gave us a senior person who got really good results for DS's left eye (he seemed to co-operate for her) but she didn't test the right eye so when we got to the doctor at the end he was comparing right with left both tested at different times by different people.

They put eye drops in (we were there for 6 1/2 hours altogether) and said that DS's eye sight is now +2.5 instead of +2 in each eye and he has a stigmatism of .5 in left eye. He had a stigmatism in both eyes 2 years ago. When they tested him a year ago this had gone and now it has come back in just one eye. Is that possible?

I have found myself really really doubting any results they are sending me away with and not at all comfortable putting the new glasses on DS.

The first optomotrist would have sent us away asking us to do 4 hours of patching for left eye to strengthen - but because I insisted that they retest we now don't have to do patching at all. 4 hours of patching when unnecessary would cause more harm than good.