Trends in UK contact lens prescribing during 2014

For almost two decades, we have reported on the types of contact lenses prescribed by British eye care practitioners to monitor the uptake of new product types in the market, and to give practitioners an overview of the prescribing behaviour of their peers.1-18 This short paper presents our results for 2014.

A key attribute of our annual survey is that we have used the same methods each time. At the beginning of the year we randomly select 1,000 registered practitioners (700 optometrists and 300 contact lens opticians) from the GOC register and send out a single-page A4 questionnaire. The first 10 patients prescribed contact lenses after its receipt are recorded by the practitioner and the form is returned to the Eurolens Research offices in Manchester. We track data about the following: date of fitting, new fit or refit, age and sex of patient, lens material, lens design, frequency of replacement, days per week of wear, modality (daily or extended wear) and care system. A weighting system is employed to account for the volume of activity undertaken by the respondents, as judged by the time period required to achieve 10 fits.