Echoes of the Past: Snapshots of the profession in the 1960s

The current topics section of the August 14 edition of Optician is the focus of this week’s Echoes of the past retrospective. Serving as an introduction to the journal, current topics detailed small snapshots of happenings within the profession, often with a satirical slant.

The popularity of privately purchased frames and the abolition of charges on spectacles supplied by the Supplementary Ophthalmic Service (SOS) were two of the subjects that caught the journal’s eye.

The Ministry of Health’s annual report for 1963 showed an increase in the number of patients that had NHS-supplied lenses fitted to private frames. Nearly half of adults chose to have a private frame glazed and 31.6 per cent opted to have one supplied by the NHS. The figures came despite what Optician described as ‘well-meaning’ publicity that NHS frames offered patients all that was really necessary.