Everyone's feeling the pressure

It's always nice to be proved right, but often it proves a Pyrrhic victory.

News arrives this week on the results of a study into the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence's guidelines for glaucoma diagnosis and management introduced in 2009.

The study shows these guidelines have failed in exactly the way most optometrists predicted they would. Namely, that referring everyone above an arbitrary threshold of intraocular pressure creates a rash of referrals that mostly prove negative.

The move to this scheme has created negatives for everyone. Patients have been needlessly inconvenienced and worried, it has overburdened the National Health Service and cost it, and the taxpayer, a lot of money. The damage to optical practices is even greater. Not only does it create difficult situations in practices but what effect is it likely to have on patient trust in the optometrist?