News

Plymouth University opens training clinic

Hospitals

Plymouth

Plymouth University has opened a new eye clinic to provide on-campus experience to its third-year optometry students.

Its Centre for Eyecare Excellence (CEE) will offer eye examinations, spectacle dispensing and contact lens care.

The clinic opened last week in advance of an official launch in October, when the optometry school's initial 2011 intake of students reach their third year.

Plymouth has represented a regional drive to bring optometry training to the South West and secured funding from multiple Specsavers. Construction of the new clinic has been entirely funded by the university.

Professor Graham Sewell, head of the school of health professions and associate dean for research in the Faculty of Health, Education and Society, said the CEE served as a not-for-profit training clinic.

The campus location, on the university campus in Gibbon Street opposite the Robbins Conference Centre, had been chosen to primarily treat staff and students from the university.

'That was a deliberate strategy because we didn't want to go into competition with our colleagues on the high street,' said Professor Sewell.

He said third-year students on the optometry course would spend most of their time doing clinical work, at the CEE or local hospitals in the South West. Local optometrists would be hired as supervisors in the clinic and paid as assistant lecturers, while the clinic manager would be a member of the academic staff.

Professor Sewell added: 'It is an exciting time for a degree which is underpinned by science but focused towards patient care. There is increased emphasis on practical skills training and placement within industry from the first term onwards.

'We also envisage this new centre will facilitate clinical and practice research in optometry and will serve as a regional hub for networking and continuing education events.

'Plymouth is a modern university and the optometry department is just one example of this. To have a clinical optometry school here makes sense. If you didn't have a school here a large number of local optometry students would be disenfranchised.'