Back to reality
I have decided I must be getting old. Over the years I have listened to my older colleagues who, when faced with change, have commented that they have only got a few years to go before they retire and they are glad they are getting out of optics.
I used to think this was dreadful, but sometimes now, albeit very occasionally, I begin to think that I may just be getting tired of all of this and my thoughts wander to a Greek taverna by the shore in some far off place.
However, I am soon jolted back to reality by Mrs Moneo's desire for the lounge (or as I am given to believe it is called, the 'living room') to be redecorated and realise that I've got a few more years of work to go yet!
It cannot be denied that a lot has happened this year with regard to the NHS. First of all my PCT has changed its name and its identifier code. This means yet another set of rubber stamps. (Who pays for those, I wonder?) Then there is the GOS review. Will anything really change there?
Then I read the other week in the Sunday Express that the GOC is a trade quango! I always thought it was a statutory body without whom I cannot practise legally. Am I losing touch?
But then in among all of this I see a patient who tells me I am not allowed to retire until after she dies, and I receive another letter thanking my staff and I for the wonderful service they have received.
Awesome responsibility
It is then I realise that whatever the NHS or anyone else may throw at me I love my job. I became an optometrist to serve my patients.
At the outset my professor, Gerald Dunn, instilled in me a clinical pride that has never left me. It is to people like him that I owe so much gratitude. He was the one person who instilled in a generation the ethos that we were not shopkeepers but highly skilled clinicians with an array of unique clinical skills.
It is when I receive letters, like the one from my patient the other day, I realise the massive responsibility I have to people's eyesight and lives in general.
You and I have the power to make people see clearly and sometimes to save them from serious illness. We often forget this or take it for granted, but this is an awesome responsibility and, no matter who holds our contract, or who pays us, or what they pay us, it will never change.
It is for that reason that I became an optometrist. It is for that reason that I will always strive to achieve the high clinical standards my patients have the right to expect from me. It is for that reason I will defend my profession against those who want to turn us into shopkeepers and that is why my taverna on the beach will have to wait for a long time yet.