Optician Index May 2015: Turnover in focus

After good results last month, May has seen monthly decreases in all of our key performance measures apart from the value of solutions. Most of our indicators, however, are higher than the same month last year. Annual growth is positive for our clinical measures and the majority of the dispensing but neutral for our financial benchmarks.

This month our report focus is on the financial factors of practice management and we make comparisons between the turnover per eye examination and the dispensing rate by practice turnover size.

Last month Optician Index reported an increase in total practice turnover to 178 Index points which was the highest value since May 2013. Over the past two years this benchmark has peaked in May, but this year we have seen a small monthly fall of two Index points to 176. Figure 1 shows this benchmark from January 2013, and although we saw the peak last month the moving average, which takes in to account the previous 12 month’s values, has hardly moved and the annual growth is now only marginally positive at less than 0.1 per cent. The linear trend line, which takes into account only the values included in the chart and no historic data, is also flat.