Moneo writes: Protect the future of optometry

Recently I listened to Doug Perkins giving his thoughts on the way optometry needed to move forward to meet the challenges ahead. It is clear there are a lot of challenges and I have spoken about some of them in the past. What I found disappointing about his whole approach was just how unimaginative it was. Most times when this profession looks at changing how we do things the approach at best could be described as minimalist tinkering. What I heard from Doug could be classified as radical tinkering. The problem is it is still only tinkering.

He spoke about the threats we face from online refracting and online spectacle sales in the future. What would be the best way of combatting this? Quite simply remove optometry’s reliance on refracting and selling glasses. I would suggest therefore deregulating the refraction function. Of course this blows ‘tinkering’ out of the water and replaces it with really radical thinking. I am not surprised the head of Specsavers does not even consider dropping the refraction function as a core function from an optometrist’s arsenal. My concern is that I find it hard to believe that large companies who predicate their existence on a retail function are not already considering the whole online refracting model themselves.