Demand for eye-care services is projected to increase [1]. Among proposed schemes to tackle this issue, the most promising involves incorporating a primary care model, where patients with stable eye conditions are discharged from tertiary ophthalmological centres and followed-up by trained primary eye-care providers in the community [2]. There is also an increased impetus internationally to credential nursing staff and optometrists for procedures to cope with the increased need for eye-care services [3], [4].

While the responsibility of informed consent taking for surgeries and procedures is borne by the proceduralist, community eye-care practitioners are crucial in augmenting the process through effective and early counselling of patients. Early counselling empowers patients with opportunities to develop an adequate understanding of the procedure, realistic expectations of outcomes and complications, and provides more time for decision-making. Thorough understanding of the benefits and risks of procedures can significantly increase patient satisfaction following a procedure [5]. More pertinent to counselling is its impact on patient cooperation by allaying anxiety surrounding the “unknown”, especially with procedures where patients are awake with minimal to no sedation as the procedure is performed. For instance, early preoperative counselling (termed prehabilitation) by trained clinicians prior to spine surgery reduces duration of hospital admissions, patient anxiety and normalise expectations [6].

For the proceduralists, proper counselling and documentation is crucial in addressing and minimising medico-legal risks [7]. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to demonstrate proof of counselling apart from the practitioner's written documentation of the consultation. This takes up a significant proportion of the consultation duration and further adds to clinical workload. Often, despite the practitioners’ best efforts, patients may experience difficulties understanding and retaining information presented to them. The average patient comprehends and retains only 48% of the information presented to them verbally during consultation [8]. This problem is particularly pertinent in the setting of cataract surgery as it is the most common ophthalmic procedure performed [9], with cataracts being one of the leading causes of visual impairment affecting an estimated 15 million people worldwide. Despite it being a high volume and short procedure, counselling and consent taking is paramount because risks of complications, loss of vision and loss of the globe still exist.

This is further exacerbated in resource-limited settings, where poor understanding of ocular diseases and their management, high illiteracy rates and an innate fear of surgery are widespread [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. Promisingly, the use of combined perioperative audiovisual aids improves the recipients’ understanding and retention of useful information [15], [16], [17], [18]. This study evaluates the utility of pictorial aids as part of the preoperative consultation for cataract surgery and its impact on patient's knowledge, anxiety, preparedness and ease of decision-making to better aid eye-care practitioners of all spectrums in counselling patients.