Contact lenses for children remains an under-utilised market. Bhavin Shah, of Central Vision Opticians based in both Finchley and Kingsbury, London, wants to change this.
He completed his training at Manchester University and has since become an accredited behavioural optometrist and visual performance specialist, with over 22 years’ worth of experience. Shah uses this experience to specialise in children’s vision and visual performance, with a special clinic to assess eye movements and tracking difficulties that prevent successful reading and writing.
This was recognised at the Optician Awards in April, where the practice took home the award for Children’s Contact Lens Practice of the Year.
Shah says: ‘I knew as a teenager that I wanted to do something in the medical field that also really helps people and changes their lives. My course at Manchester was a mixture of medical elements and science, as well as psychology, maths and ergonomics,’ preparing him nicely for his future career at Central Vision.
As a children’s optometrist, Shah explains that he works a lot with children who wear both glasses and contact lenses. ‘I use Misight Contact Lenses for Myopia Control with children. It helps them to perform at school and play sports better, as well as ultimately helping their lives. The result is that kids feel more confident. It’s so rewarding to see a change in a child’s performance and life after using the contact lenses.’ Indeed, a survey recently undertaken by Johnson & Johnson Vision Care highlights that 86% of children feel better about their ability to participate in sports when wearing contact lenses, as opposed to glasses.
As for teaching a child how to insert and remove contact lenses, Shah says that it’s not as difficult as you might think. ‘Children are more resilient than people realise. The key is to be calm and confident with them and to understand their fears and concerns. We always say that it’s a very normal experience for people.’ Out of all the child contact lenses patients the practice deals with, 80% of them have been successful. ‘It’s very much a mind over body thing,’ he adds. ‘Children feel the fear and do it anyway, which is often far easier for us when teaching them how to insert the lenses.’
Central Vision Opticians’ website boasts an impressive looking video, which was created and filmed by Shah himself. With the intention of advising parents how to help their children insert and remove contact lenses, he created the storyboard and all the ideas behind the video, thinking of what messages he wanted to get across as well as background information and any solutions to regularly occurring problems.
‘I believe this video is important for visually minded people as it helps them to understand the contact lenses process by seeing it. Something visual is a good way of telling a story and bringing a message across,’ Shah says.
Shah and his team knew a lot of the other nominees in their category at the Optician awards this year. He says: ‘We wanted to win but hadn’t raised our hopes. We were absolutely delighted to take home the award, it was an amazing experience. The rest of the awards were a bit of a blur to be honest, we were on such a high. It was great to get this recognition from the industry.’
Since the awards, the practice has seen an increase in the number of patients asking for the myopia contact lenses. The team have communicated the awards win by posting the news on their various social media accounts and also have a large banner up in the window. They say this has helped increase their credibility as a practice and will surely result in them becoming more well-known for their specialism.
Shah explains that it’s made a big difference when it comes to generating conversation around the subject of children wearing contact lenses. ‘Current patients of ours have spread the word about what we do and have recommended us and what we offer.’ The youngest patient that the practice has who wears contact lenses is a boy aged six, and he has been wearing them for a year. Shah describes his confidence as having risen hugely since swapping his glasses for contacts – music to any contact lens optician’s ears. •