ESCRS founder honoured at UKISCRS annual meeting

Patrick Condon Patrick Condon, one of the founding members and a former treasurer of the ESCRS, will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the United Kingdom and Ireland Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (UKISCRS) at their 42nd Annual Meeting, which takes place from Wednesday November 7 to Friday November 9 in Leicestershire, England. Mr Condon did a six-year residency programme in ophthalmology at the Royal Eye Hospital, London. which involved a rotation to the Croydon Eye Unit and Lambeth - St Thomas' Hospital group. He subsequently became a consultant at the Bromley and Farnborough Hospital group for two years before returning to Waterford, Ireland. During his Waterford appointment, he introduced IOL implantation in the 1970s, followed by phacoemulsification surgery, which he initiated in Ireland in 1987 reporting on his first 150 cases a year later. In conjunction with Prof Michael O'Keeffe at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, he was the first ophthalmologist to introduce LASIK to Ireland in 1993 with the use of the Automated Lamellar Keratoplasty microkeratome. During the late 1990s, he became actively involved with UKISCRS, becoming president in 1994 and delivering the Choyce Medal Lecture in 2004. Following his appointment in 1982 by Dr Cornelius Binkhorst as the Irish member of the European Intraocular Implant Council , forerunner of the ESCRS, he became congress chairman and treasurer of the ESCRS for almost 10 years, for which he was awarded the Grand Medal of Merit in 1999, followed by the Ridley Medal Lecture in 2005. He was presented with the ASCRS Honorary Guest Award in 2009 at the society's annual meeting in San Francisco, USA. In his lifetime achievement lecture, Mr Condon intends to cover the 50 years with anecdotal pieces of interesting information with photographs and video sequences that he has collected from his wide world travels and experiences.