Open door policy

It is exactly 70 years since a small pharmacy in the Texas town of Fort Worth decided to go into the sterile ophthalmic products market. Robert Alexander and William Connor, whose names were concatenated to create Alcon, went on to create an international eye care product giant. In 1977 Alcon was bought by Nestle and underwent a massive increase in international growth before becoming part of Novartis.

Guests were welcomed to Alcon’s Watchmoor Park facility near Camberley, which is known as the Alcon Academy for Eyecare Excellence, by vice-president of sales Ray Pasko. He started by highlighting the huge impact visual impairment has on the world today. ‘There’s a tremendous injustice in eye care,’ he said before cataloguing some of the key numbers facing global and local eye care.