Simon Jones: 8 out of 10 cats

There were some eyebrow raising findings in a couple of surveys released this week. A comprehensive survey commissioned by Braemar Finance looked at how optical businesses were trading during the pandemic. Eight out of ten people said they were very positive (36%) or somewhat positive (46%) about the post pandemic economic outlooks for their businesses.

I was encouraged greatly by this, as from speaking to practices about how businesses were performing at different points over the past year, I would honestly have guessed that the figure would have been significantly lower. Still, always nice to be pleasantly surprise.

What wasn’t such a nice surprised was the number of practitioners that had concerns about Covid-19 vaccinations. Nearly a third (31%) said they were uncomfortable about taking a vaccine. Given how so many members of the optical profession have stepped up to help with the vaccine rollout in recent months, I was genuinely shocked to read this. As a profession, we’re used to dealing with clinical trials and interpreting results, but that hasn’t translated into trust in the available vaccines. What made the figure harder to believe was that 40% of practitioners said that they would only agree to see a patient after being presented with evidence of being vaccinated. It’s the sort of thing that might make the people at the Optical Consumer Complaints Service (OCCS) wince.