Criticism of the College of Optometrists' letters to practitioners, which detailed individuals' 2004 CET points, has drawn a response from the College of Optometrists.
Criticism of the College of Optometrists' letters to practitioners, which detailed individuals' 2004 CET points, has drawn a response from the College of Optometrists.
Practitioners have questioned some of the totals reached in the self-certification letter, which was intended to confirm the number of points derived from last year's continuous education.One optometrist told optician that he had tried and failed to call the College on the morning earlier this month he had received his 'wildly inaccurate' total, calling it 'another CET cock-up'.
'Their switchboard must of gone berserk as everyone was calling them, because I spoke to fellow optometrists later and nobody could get through,' he said. The optometrist, who added that he wanted to remain anonymous, commented: 'Instead of being correct, the information I received had got my credits total totally wrong.'
A spokeswoman for the College said that the organisation had processed about 8,000 CET forms in the last couple of months, with an audit showing almost 90 per cent accuracy due to the diligence of College staff.
'We wrote to those members who logged their points in paper form about a month ago,' she said. 'The points accumulated by this group ranged from 0 to 255 for 2004. A very small number still have queries on them, so our work is not yet finished.
'This week we issued letters to our members who had registered their credits online detailing their CET points for 2004. The number of points registered by this group fell into a similar range to that above.
'We have received a number of calls from members querying the number of points logged online, but on investigation we have found that the majority of these have been due to people submitting their CET points both in electronic and paper format and it has been a comparatively simple task to amend these records.'