Realistic fees
A lot of recent letters comment about the lack of remuneration for optometrists within GOS. We are expected to provide a first-class service for no remuneration and to put our hands in our pockets to make up the shortfall in overheads.
Compare that to GPs who get five QOF points (worth £124-60 each plus employers’ pension contribution) if they can show a percentage of their diabetics have had retinopathy screening. I work it out that they get paid nearly as much as a GOS fee as a salary on top of all their overheads every time they tick a box to say someone else has done the work for that patient.
If a GP asks you to do the work, perhaps a letter explaining he gets paid more than you to do the work and he should get his finger out and do it himself or pay you a realistic fee for doing it. £40+ seems fair.
As we all provide more than the minimum required for a GOS test under the ‘Stockport protocol’, surely we are providing a ‘GOS PLUS’ eye test and can charge people a top-up fee to bring it in line with our private fee.
Obviously we could not force all GOS patients to pay this fee as that would breach our terms of service. We could offer them GOS tests to the Stockport protocol on Monday mornings (or GOS plus tests for no extra charge). We would then be treating the GOS1 as a voucher and only doing 10 per cent pro bono work as opposed to 85 per cent. Can anyone see any problems with doing this?
Peter Harrop
Caernarfon
Antti Vannas
We would like to express our deep sadness at the passing of Professor Antti Vannas.
Antti’s expertise and knowledge contributed greatly to our work, and we all loved his zest for life and tremendous spirit. His research included myopia, refractive correction, corneal physiology, and development of new vision correction. He played a key role in advancing corneal and refractive surgery and implantation and the understanding of ocular inflammation, and he developed a network of research collaborations in Finland, Australia, America and India.
We are proud to be associated with the Vannas Fellowship, which was established to celebrate the contributions of Antti to science and research and to recognise his great and noble capacity to stimulate us all to seek better ways of working together to improve sight for all people.
Our thoughts are with his family at this time, and we offer them our condolences and best wishes.
Staff and students of: The Vision Cooperative Research Centre; The Institute for Eye Research; The International Centre for Eyecare Education; The International Association of Contact Lens Educators