Bill Harvey: You better take cover

I always remember something a patient said to me at the very start of my career in optics. When I asked them about their last eye test, the patient said she had been unimpressed by the optometrist. ‘When he was looking into my eyes, I could tell he was really thinking about his next skiing holiday,’ she said.

Stereotypes about the various clinical professions abound and, it might be argued, fail to keep up with reality. That ‘doctors’ are the most stressed would be a widely held view among the public, while few might think the same about eye care professionals (ECPs). The problem is that there are many more factors contributing to stress than simply the pressure of the job itself. Vets, for example, are high in the ‘stress league’, but one analysis of this has shown that this is partly due to a very real fear of losing their jobs to AI. After all, their role is based around interpreting signs to develop a management plan without the need for communication.