As China's first IPO listed chain of ophthalmic medical institutions, AIER Eye Hospital Group attaches great importance to the comprehensive development of clinical, education and research. At AIER, the demand for sub-specialist surgeons is increasing with the expansion of the group, but the number of graduates in China is less than 30 thousand per year. To tackle this shortage, in 2010, AIER Eye Medical Management Center started to explore a training model for ophthalmic surgeons better suited for the overall development of AIER starting from cataract sub-specialty.

With 6 years of continuous exploration and development, AIER has developed and implemented a competitive training system for ophthalmic sub-specialty, including eight sub-specialties and ten sets of surgical physician standards and management systems such as cataracts, fundus diseases, strabismus and pediatric ophthalmology, orbital and eye plastic operation, lacrimal duct sub-specialty, corneal disease refractive operation and etc. The standardized training played a positive role in enhancing medical quality and safety, service processes, surgical effectiveness and other hospital services of AIER. And also, it has made a positive contribution to China's cataract operation skills training evaluation system. In 2016, AIER received the award of “outstanding cataract operation training project of Chinese Medical Association”.

Each sub-specialty at AIER has more than 10 training bases due to the different characteristics of sub-specialties. Until June 2017, more than 526 ophthalmologists have been trained, of which 224 have qualified for the surgical certificate. From 2013 to 2016, more than 72,000 cataracts surgeries were performed by physicians trained by AIER.