Moneo writes: Closing time for excessive testing

One of the things that I always remember from my training at university was being taught the methodology behind a full eye examination. From the outset students were taught to do every test feasible on every patient every time. By the time we came to doing a routine sight test in the PQEs we had honed this technique so that it had become second nature to do every test every time on every patient. It had been ingrained in us that this was necessary in order to prevent missing any possible asymptomatic pathology. Without knowing it at the time we had been indoctrinated into a weird type of paranoia that never seems to leave an optometrist through their whole career. To reinforce this paranoia came the knowledge that we could be hauled in front of our professional body at any time if we had missed something and would have to prove we had done everything in our power and would have to answer to our peers, all of whom had been trained the same way and possessed the same level of paranoia, and prove we had not been negligent. It would be imperative to produce records of an eye examination that had reams and reams of results that proved we had actually performed individual tests and not just comments that what we had observed was normal or otherwise. If this was not possible, we stood the very real chance of being suspended or struck off. Therefore, over the years, every optometrist develops an ability to carry out meaningless tests on patients pretty much for the sake of protecting themselves rather than serving the needs of their patient. Undoubtedly this would have continued ad infinitum had it not been for the Covid-19 outbreak.