Anniversaries in optics come thick and fast with practices, companies, and people constantly passing notable milestones.
However, I would like to use some of this space to pay tribute to Vision Care for Homeless People (VCHP), which is celebrating 20 years of providing free eye care and spectacles to vulnerable people.
The charity had been running for quite a few years when I joined Optician and one of my first assignments was to visit one of its clinics in London.
It was a genuinely inspirational experience to meet the volunteers enabling such a service to run and speak to the patients about the challenges they faced accessing eye care.
Over the past two decades, VCHP has helped more than 18,000 people to better vision and now runs clinics in seven cities across England, so hats off to everyone involved.
At a recent event in London to mark the anniversary, one of the founding optometrists, Elaine Styles, outlined plans for a further 17 clinics to be brought into operation in the near future.
If you would like to help VCHP make these plans a reality, ways to volunteer, donate or fundraise can be found at visioncarecharity.org.
Speaking of that VCHP celebration, my sense is that optics is more abuzz with in-person events than any time since early 2020. Look out for reports from the Silmo trade show and a recent Luxottica press day in next week’s issue of Optician.
The month of November will see the trend continue with the British Contact Lens Association’s first in-person Presidential Address since the pandemic, Optician’s own Eyes on Sustainability conference, and an intriguing CPD event hosted by four independent ophthalmic lens labs.
If you can’t get along in-person, not to worry, you will be able to read all about them in these pages.