While the Covid-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented challenge to ophthalmic service delivery, it also creates a unique opportunity to rapidly expand and promote new uses of telemedicine. Telemedicine offers distinct benefits to patients, clinicians, and communities during the current crisis: it supports social distancing measures by minimising the need for patients and clinicians to travel to hospitals; it enables continued service delivery at a time when in-person outpatient activity has been severely restricted, supporting patients continued access to medical care, promoting patient confidence and reducing patient and clinician anxiety; and reducing the anticipated surge in demand when normal services resume by allowing existing referral, surgery booking, follow-up and discharge pathways to continue.

Telemedicine is well established in ophthalmology. Its largest application is in the use of the store-and-forward model used in the UK National Diabetic Eye Screening Programme [1]. Teledermatology has historically been well integrated in service delivery due to its reliance on visual recognition [2]. Akin to dermatology, oculoplastic conditions are suited for telemedicine as most relevant clinical signs can be elicited without the aid of specialist equipment such as a slit lamp. Most devices used for video consultations would provide sufficient resolution for the objective assessment of oculoplastic parameters [3,4,5,6] and those examinations that cannot be conducted effectively (for example, visual acuity or optic nerve function testing) have often been conducted already by the referrer or during a previous examination.

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