UK contact lens prescribing in 2019

For almost a quarter of a century, we have examined the state of the UK contact lens market in terms of the lenses and solutions prescribed by British eye care practitioners.^1-23 The initial rationale for the work still holds; we wish to report details of products used by a large peer group to allow individual clinicians to benchmark their own product choices and prescribing habits

In early 2019, we selected 1,400 optometrists and 600 contact lens opticians at random from the current General Optical Council register and sent out our A4 survey form. We asked for some background information about each recipient and then requested data on the first 10 contact lens fits performed since the survey form arrived. This included: date of fitting, new or refit, age, sex, material, design, frequency of replacement, days per week of wear, daily or extended wear, and care system. This was entered into our database of almost 400,000 lens fits and analysed. A weighting system was used to appropriately account for the volume of activity undertaken by the respondents, calculated by the time period required to achieve 10 fits.