Join us for the 23rd Annual BARS Conference

Friday 19th September 2025

Holiday Inn Birmingham City Centre, B5 4EW

You can now purchase your tickets HERE

The power packed one day event will give great opportunities for learning, networking and industry insights, with highlights including:

Keynote speaker - Professor Sarita Jacob, Consultant Ophthalmologist, discussing new treatments for DR.

DUK Together Type 1 Panel - Young DUK leaders sharing their personal experiences of living with diabetes and all things eye care.

Ali Askari & Suzanne Althauser - Implementing OCT in screening.

Arijit Mitra, Consultant Ophthalmologist and VR Surgery Specialist - Vitrectomy case studies.

Kate Jordan - Latest NHSE Updates

Professor Peter Scanlon, Clinical Director, NHS DESP - Concordia study & Non - Caucasian Trial.

Free Drinks and Canape reception - The ideal opportunity for networking.

As always a huge thank you goes to our amazing trade exhibitors for supporting BARS 2025, without them this would not be possible!

The 2024 BARS/Topcon Healthcare Poster Competition

The winning posters of the 2024 BARS/Topcon (GB) Medical Ltd Poster Competition were announced at this year's conference in Liverpool with the winners each receiving Amazon vouchers. The standard and content exceeded expectations and with a total of 26 entries, it was difficult to pick out the individual winners. The three posters can be viewed below by clicking the relevant title.

1st) Ian Brennan, Stephen Kelly, Joanne Harmon, Matthew Phillips, Andrew Combes, Shane Mc Mahon, Rob Acheson, David Keegan, Helen Kavanagh, Lousie O'Toole,

EVALUATING THE OCT PATHWAY IN THE IRISH DIABETIC EYE SCREENING PROGRAMME

2nd) Benedict Symon, Carrie Hinton, Gillian Slingerland, Amy Austin, Sallyann Matthews, Carmel Japel, Roger Brint

THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF THE HOSPITAL EYE SERVICE RECALL INITIATIVE ON PATIENT CARE

3rd) Marc Lewis, Anthony Bostock

R3A REFERRAL COHORT ANALYSIS IN OUR MOST DEPRIVED AREA: SWINDON

Once again we would like to thanks all of our participants for their hard work and to our sponsors Topcon Healthcare for their continued support.

The 2024 BARS/Mainline Instruments Photography Competition 

The winners and runners-up of the 2024 BARS/Mainline Instruments Photography Competition were announced at this year's conference in Liverpool. With a total of 11 entries in the clinical category, the winner was decided as Susan Whalley from the Central Mersey DESP team and the runner-up was Sarah Lake from Jersey DESP.

The artistic category had a total of 7 entries and was won by Jade Jones from Central Mersey DESP and the runner-up was Diliana Nikolova from South West London DESP.

The winners received £100 Amazon vouchers for each category and the runners-up received £50 Amazon vouchers for each category and they all received a certificate.

Below are the winners from each category from 2024, Once again we would like to thank Mainline Instruments Ltd for their sponsorship of the BARS photo competition.

Below are the winners from each category from 2024.

Click on the image to open a larger version.

                       Photo by Susan Whalley (Central Mersey)                                                            Photo by Jade Jones (Central Mersey)

Upcoming OCT learning opportunities - see below for details

Optical Coherence Tomography Interpretation Course

Kings Health Partners

This course will allow you to improve your understanding of Optical Coherence Tomography of the retina. The various modules and questions throughout will cover the significance of the individual layers with and without pathology on the retinal scans on both the Topcon Triton and Heidelberg machine platforms. The course will also cover the typical changes seen with diabetes and other non - DR pathologies, including vein occlusions, wet AMD, vitreo-retinal disorders and drug toxicity.

For full details please click on the photo below to access the course site.

We are proud to mention that our own council president was involved in the development of this course (Samantha Mann BARS President)

At the beginning of this year, BARS Council proposed a change to the association's constitution to allow for the annual membership fee to be abolished. BARS members voted overwhelmingly in favour of this proposal, and following an Extraordinary General Meeting on 6th February 2015, the change has been approved. This means that from 1st April 2015, there has been no charge to become an active member of the British Association of Retinal Screening. For more information about this change, and to join BARS for free, please visit the Membership page.

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