Dr. Loretta Ng, who joined our growing practice in 2007, is a renowned clinician, educator, and community health advocate. Her diverse experiences, first as a private practitioner, then as an academician, and most recently in public health, have resulted in a unique vantage point of eye care providers’ role within the national and international health care system. Her ability to translate difficult concepts into understandable analogies has earned her many accolades from patients, students, and health care organizers, most recently Women in Optometry. We are extremely fortunate to have her join our practice and continue our tradition of serving the community with excellence in patient care.

Dr. Ng began her optometric career as an honors graduate of Queen's University (Bachelor of Science) and the University of Waterloo, School of Optometry in Canada. Following the completion of her Doctor of Optometry degree she entered private practice in Vancouver, British Columbia and was an active member in the profession, serving as President of the local association. During her five years in Vancouver, Dr. Ng not only learned to snowboard, fly fish and golf, she also had to brush up on her mother tongue Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese. With a large Asian population in Vancouver many of her patients only spoke Chinese requiring Dr. Ng to develop her language skills to the point where “many of my patients would come back a year later and comment that I’m getting much better. We would joke about the many horrific linguistic errors I made before. Let’s just say some of those errors resulted in quite a few embarrassing misunderstandings.”

In 2000, after four years of practice, Dr. Ng began her academic pursuit by completing an ocular disease and refractive surgery residency with Britton Vision Associations and TLC in Oklahoma City. When asked why she chose this particular residency, she indicated that “Oklahoma has the broadest scope of practice in optometry which allowed me to work with anterior segment lasers and perform minor surgical procedures that I wouldn’t have been able to do elsewhere. “ Even to this day there are relatively few optometrists that are licensed to perform these advanced procedures. In light of Dr. Ng’s wealth of clinical knowledge and experience in the area of ocular disease and refractive surgeries, she was retained by the Southern California College of Optometry (SCCO) as an assistant professor in the ocular disease department. For six years, Dr. Ng taught numerous ocular disease clinical courses especially those on pre and post-operative management of cataract, glaucoma and various refractive surgical procedures. During her time at SCCO she obtained research grants to develop and conduct several original clinical studies that were later published in renowned peer-reviewed journals. She also served as an investigator in several phase III FDA trials. In light of her academic accomplishments and her community efforts with third world eye missions, Special Olympics and the Asian American Optometric Society, Dr. Ng was promoted to associate professor and offered tenure at SCCO prior to her departure in June, 2007.

Since 2000 Dr. Ng has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry (AAO) and a regular presenter and instructor at the annual AAO meetings. She has also lectured at both nationally and internationally optometric education meetings to excellent reviews. Many attendees find her lecture content applicable to daily practice because she understands that “practitioners are extremely busy. I try to make my lectures and presentations relevant. I look for the pearls and nuggets they’ll be able to use.”
Like most health professionals, Dr. Ng has a passion to care for her few people and has demonstrate this dedication by providing care to individual patients daily. A few years ago Dr. Ng began to contemplate the need for a more “upstream” approach to combat the major health problems of our time, chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity. As a graduate student earning her Master’s degree at UCLA’s School of Public Health she understands the rationale of going “upstream”. “Imagine you are sitting by a river and all of a sudden you see someone drowning in the river. You swim out to save them and just as you are pulling them on shore, you see another person in the water that needs your help…and then another. In the world of chronic disease physicians are the courageous swimmers going out to rescue each drowning individual. The role of the public health practitioner is to travel “upstream” to find out the cause of the drowning. So if a collapse bridge is the originating cause, we are the ones to engineer programs to either prevent the bridge from falling or develop safety net policies to catch those endangered. That is the underlying theory of public health. As eye care providers if we are able to affect more appropriate blood glucose control in our diabetic patients we witness the reduced risk of diabetic retinopathy and its subsequent development of blindness.”

Dr. Ng’s humanitarian interest in community health reaches international regions where she has been involved with several third world eye care missions to Grenada, Jamaica and Peru. “Each time I go on a mission it is such an overwhelming experience. You are exhausted physically at the end of the day but the memories of the truly needy that you’ve helped keeps you going. It sounds like a cliché but when you see someone smile one of those huge smiles that can only come from deep down joy because you’ve help them see, you are rejuvenated and your own physical discomfort just vanishes.”

The only daughter of retired engineers currently living in Vancouver, Dr. Ng learned discipline early in Hong Kong during her first few years of schooling when “my book bag in first grade was heavier than me”. Her grandfather was one of the few Chinese scholars sent abroad to New York City to pursuit a Master’s degree in economics at Columbia University. With a family full of academics, physicians and dentists there were high expectations growing up. Although academically inclined, Dr. Ng and her brother Ben (an architect who lives with his wife and two sons in Hong Kong) have an artistic streak. “I find painting extremely relaxing and a very natural part of my life.”

The move to Oahu has been a culmination of many factors both professionally and personally. “I thoroughly enjoyed my time at SCCO and teaching students but I do miss the one on one interaction with patients. With this exciting opportunity with Dr. Jenkins’, I hope to do both.” Dr. Ng will not only be attending patients but also be involved in developing lecture programs and newsletters to the community. Outside of work, another inspiration to move to the islands is personal as her fiancé, Dr. Khan Lau, is a local optometrist with strong ties to the local community.
Although Dr. Ng has only been here a short period of time, the patients have really welcomed her and appreciates the high quality care she provides. She has a great patient bed side manner and provides easy to understand explanations and instructions related to their condition. “Sometimes a patient may be nervous about their diagnosis because they don’t know what it is and what it means to them personally. When a thorough and clear explanation is provided, their concerns and fears are dramatically alleviated and that is huge part of the healing process. With this better understanding of their own disease, the educated patient becomes more empowered and can better participate in their healthcare.”