As is an alarmingly regular occurrence, a news story has broken after the news pages have been sent to press on Optician’s weekly deadline day. Keen to get this interesting little nugget of news in this week’s issue ahead of something more in-depth next week, I felt it was best to give it the once over here.
Vision Express has allegedly sent a letter to its locum optometrist staff from its resource planning team regarding what it described as incidents of ‘falsified customer appointments,’ with a warning to anyone found to have done so that they will be reported to the General Optical Council and their service contract terminated. These falsified diary bookings were said to have been made by locums by copying an earlier appointment into a later slot, or more deceitfully, by booking a fake patient online.
Why these locums were meant to have been booking these false appointments isn’t immediately obvious from the content of the letter, but one could speculate that it’s to build more time into overly busy clinic diaries, or it could also be to artificially inflate patient demand to create the need for locum cover.
Vision Express promised a full investigation on the basis of potential fraud and breach of contract, which seems fair to me. Given the administrative paper trails afforded by modern corporate practice management systems, it should be fairly easy to find out who has been booking what.
Was such a letter addressing the multiple’s entire locum workforce necessary and is it a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? It depends on the reason for the letter. If locums have gamed the system to ensure more work then the letter was absolutely needed, but if optometrists felt the need to create extra breathing space to deal with busy clinics, the letter may have been an own goal.