Trends in UK contact lens prescribing 2023

^{Figure 1: Average age at fitting for soft and rigid lenses. Three year moving averages.}

We have managed a survey of the types of contact lenses prescribed in the UK since 1996. The initial intent was to provide information about current practice to colleagues across the country who fit contact lenses to help them benchmark their own habits, and additionally to share data with researchers and industry to inform their own work.

Those initial hopes are still the basis for this long-standing project. The survey has run in the same way over this time, and results have been published each year in Optician.1-27 The database collected over this period holds information about 28,100 contact lens fits and over a quarter of a million individual datapoints about these fits.