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Children and lenses
Dr Jeffrey Walline is probably best known to readers for his papers on fitting children with contact lenses and his demonstration that this bore little impact upon chair time. The average age of first time fits in the UK is 14-15 years of age and in Asia 17-18. The US tends to fit first time at a younger age, between 12 and 13 years. Dr Walline's first point was that younger patients may benefit from lenses and that the numbers of young patients fitted might be considerably increased if it was made known that children could be fitted with contact lenses. 'Put up signs in the waiting room,' he pleaded, 'and make sure that all practice staff are on message.' In the speaker's experience, it only needs one misinformed staff member to deter whole swathes of patients. Longer term, if one child is successfully fitted with lenses, the knock-on effect to family, friends and schoolmates is a useful practice builder.
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