Rapid change is creating mismatches that threaten the old order of things in optics.
Educational snobbery has a lot to answer for including the economic crisis looming in tertiary education. But could that crisis lead to the unpicking of the university system?
As a parent of three kids who have recently experienced the system, it is evident schools are obsessed with getting youngsters into A-levels. Once on that patch it is all too common for pupils to be forced out for underperformance or encouraged to apply for a nebulous degree course at a third rate university. University academics have stood by as debt is piled on their students.
Apprenticeships, where many of these 16-year-olds would once have ended up, have been starved of skills, the inference being that trades are secondary to university. But as Peter Black explains apprenticeships are biting back and into degree topics.
How long before VisionSavers University of Optometry is established encouraging 16-year-olds to train on the job, locally, for a degree and a wage while doing so?
Visus urges practitioners to wake up and smell the coffee such is the speed with which myopia control is marching forward. If you are not talking to patients (or prescribing kids spherical lenses) are you doing enough?
Meanwhile, the AOP and the GOC are tackling the 20-year-long issue of illegal cosmetic contact lens sales by creating a leaflet resembling a cease and desist order for practitioners to serve on transgressors.
I may be wrong but surely the AOP/GOC (combined receipts of £13m+) would be better funding a bailiff hotline for practices to call. Muscle is duly despatched to get the message across.
Sending optometrists out to put the frighteners on the guy in the local tattoo parlour, with a face full of metal, has mismatch written all over it.