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Patient Information
You can find information here about your next visit, your eye disease, testing procedures we do, and your post-operative care.
You can also find information, diagrams and answers to frequently asked questions to aid in your understanding.
Information about Alberta Retina Consultants 
In order for you to prepare for your eye examination, we would like to provide you with this background information about our practice and what will happen at your office visit.
You can expect your visit to take a minimum of one to two hours. After you have registered, the technicians will be doing a medical questionnaire and interview with you. As well, the technicians will be examining your eyes for vision and possibly taking photographs preparing you for your visit with your eye doctor. They will be placing drops in your eyes, which take about half an hour to dilate your pupils. If everything runs on schedule, you should expect to see the doctor about one hour from your appointment time.
Alberta Retina Consultants represents five of the only six retinal specialists treating retinal diseases in Northern Alberta. We service a population extending from south of Red Deer to all of Northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Northern British Columbia, approximately two million people. We are sub-specialist Ophthalmologists with a further two years of medical and surgical training following the completion of our training as medical doctors and a five-year residency as Ophthalmologists. (On average about 15 years post high school)
Many of the patients we see have problems of an urgent nature that require intervention in a short time period. Because of this, most of our days have extra urgent add-on patients from across Alberta that require immediate assessment and will likely delay your appointment. There is no such thing as an emergency department for retinal patients – we are the only doctors that treat retina problems. If you are waiting two or more hours for your appointment, please do not be upset with our staff. It is beyond their control. They are doing their best with a very busy schedule.
Please understand that if you, as our patient, had a sudden change in vision and phoned the office you would be seen emergently.
Many patients undergo other testing and may have already been seen earlier in the day and returned from the hospital. Therefore the order in which you perceive the patients arriving in the clinic may not be the order in which they are examined by the doctor. Many of our patients travel from a long distance and because of travel we make every effort to complete as much as possible in one day. If you are expected to have an examination and treatment with possible investigations on the same day, it is possible that your appointment will take an entire day extending even well after clinic hours if necessary.
We are well aware that waiting two or three hours is not desirable, but it is unavoidable at times. If you truly have an urgent matter, and have to leave for a certain reason, please do not hesitate to tell one of our staff.
We thank you for your patience and understanding and want you to know that we do everything possible to help you to have the best treatment available for your eye condition. We assure you, we do our best to try to arrange a schedule that has some resemblance of running on time, but simply due to the nature of our practice and the volume of patients we see, this is nearly impossible to accomplish.
If you feel you are unable to stay for your appointment and were not prepared for possibility of a long wait, then please let our staff know, so that they can offer to rebook you.