Moneo writes : A holiday project

With this in mind I sadly felt that, although on holiday I should investigate further. In the first establishment we entered Mrs Moneo ventured forth into the shop area only to announce loudly after a few minutes to all present that the glasses seemed very expensive and she could get them for less back in England!

Needless to say we did not stay long in that one. As I moved around looking at these many establishments it quickly became clear from the very large signs and the brochures outside each one that they were all very keen to hammer home the point that their optometrists were all very highly trained in the various universities in England and that they were all registered with recognised bodies back in England as well.

One shop announced that they were ophthalmic optometrists while another gave the solemn undertaking that all their optometrists were registered with the British College of Optometrists, one even claimed to have worked at Boots and Specsavers! It was quite clear that a lot of these places did not seem to know what their clinicians should be called, or who their professional bodies actually were.

Slightly concerned by this and knowing the high standards that the College of Optometrists sets its members I questioned an optometrist in one shop who was very highly qualified and a member of the ‘British College of Optometrists’ how long a test would take. He assured me that it would take 10 to 15 minutes and include a glaucoma test.

When I asked what that involved he told me he would puff air at my eyes. I was intrigued that such a simple process could tell whether I had glaucoma so I asked if that was all that he needed to do to find out if I had glaucoma and he assured me that was all. I decided that maybe I would forego the opportunity of exercising his professional skills.

I did however begin to wonder just how our professional bodies regulate their overseas members. It is clear from my small survey that there may be many ‘opticians’ working abroad who make claims in their own countries to be registered with various professional bodies in England but either are not or do not care about the professional standards to which they should be signing up to.

With so many people now moving freely around the world and the reputation of British optometry being so high, it is important to all optometrist in this country and to our professional bodies especially that this reputation is not marred by people in far off countries. We should all hope that our professional bodies police these overseas members frequently and diligently.

My fear is that they do nothing at all to check on and regulate these overseas members performance while happily taking their annual fees from them. If that is the case we who are policed diligently need to be making our feelings known to those bodies as it is their members overseas who just may be doing permanent damage to our reputation to say nothing of their customers’ vision.