A health economics study by the European Council of Optometry and Optics (ECOO) has found that optometry is a safe and cost-effective alternative in primary eye care.
As a result, ECOO has called for greater integration of appropriately qualified optometrists (OOs) in primary eye care across the whole of Europe, with related legal provisions needing to be created in the various European countries.
Comparative analysis of delivery of primary eye care in three European countries, carried out at the Department of Medicinal Management at the University of Duisburg-Essen, looked into three different eye care systems - the UK, Germany and France. It concluded that greater integration of optometrists into primary eye care was safe, cost effective and structurally necessary.
'A model based entirely on OOs - such as the UK - where OOs are primary eye care providers is just as safe as a model based entirely on ophthalmologists where ophthalmologists are the primary eye care providers,' ECOO said.
In Germany, where OOs and ophthalmologists shared responsibilities, the provision of eye care would have collapsed if OOs had not already taken on essential tasks, said ECOO. Here 73 per cent of visual aid prescriptions and 67 per cent of primary care for contact lenses was carried out by OOs.
France, where ophthalmol-ogists have almost exclusive responsibility, needed a clear increase in the number of primary eye care providers because of demographic changes and a decreasing number of ophthalmologists.
The ageing population and an increase in age-related eye conditions would increase the need for primary eye care providers, said ECOO. For example age-related macular degeneration was predicted to rise from 875,000 cases in Germany in 2007 to 1,769,000 by 2050.
ECOO also pointed out that academic training of an OO was considerably more cost-effective than that of an ophthalmologist, costing up to two-thirds less.