Doug Perkins: The full scope

Back in 2017, I wrote an article on the theme that change was coming and ‘the past was not going to be the future.’ Our profession was in a relatively steady state but there were unstoppable external forces – nationally and internationally – that we ignored at our peril. To bring them to life I used the proven economics Pest (political, economic, social, technology) model, which for me demonstrated that industry change is inevitable.

The way you could apply this model to optometry at the time was:

It was risky that our full scope of optometry services (particularly in England) was not fully accepted as joined up with key NHS services. Our NHS arrangements were fragile, even though we have been contracted since 1948.