EMERGENCIES involving the eye – or ocular emergencies – are routinely encountered by the Equicall team, for which I work. They accounted for about one in 20 of the emergencies attended by the team in the past 18 months, and can understandably cause a great deal of worry.
The first challenge when a call comes in about an eye injury is establishing what exactly has happened. The difficulty with triaging (assessing the severity of the injury and hence the urgency required for treatment) an ocular emergency over the phone is that a horse or pony will always present in a similar way when they have a painful eye, no matter what the cause is. Clients tend to report a combination
