Richard B. Packard MD, FRCS, FRCOphth

Richard B. Packard has been director of Arnott Eye Associates, the internationally recognised centre for ophthalmic excellence, since the retirement of Eric Arnott in 1999. He trained at the Middlesex Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children Great Ormond Street, the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases and Moorfields Eye Hospital. In 1979 as Senior Registrar at Charing Cross Hospital working under Eric Arnott he first started to perform minimally invasive phacoemulsification surgery for the removal of cataract. It had been Eric Arnott who introduced phaco to Europe in 1973 but very few people there were doing this technique routinely until the late 1980s.

Richard Packard in 1981 published the first description in the medical literature of the use of a folded soft lens in cataract surgery. Since then he has continued to teach phaco techniques as well as being involved in the development of new intraocular lenses, phaco machines and other instrumentation. He has lectured in over 50 countries and is currently involved with the move to micro-incisional cataract surgery.

He is senior surgeon at the renowned Prince Charles Eye Unit in Windsor from where most of his research in cataract and lens surgery has emanated. He was a board member of the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons from 1999-2007, member of the Cataract Clinical Committee of American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery from 2004-2008 and is now on their Programme Committee. He has chaired the ESCRS Video Competition Judging Panel since 2000. He is on the Education Committee of ESCRS and runs the Cataract Surgery Didactic Teaching Course. He is on the peer review panel for the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, Eye, the British Journal of Ophthalmology and the Asia Pacific Journal of Ophthalmology and regularly contributes to ophthalmic journals.
He is currently Chairman of the Association of Ophthalmologists of the UK and deputy chairman of the Federation of Independent Practitioner Organisations. This last is an overarching body that has most of the professional medical and surgical organisations as members and is involved in healthcare in the independent sector.