Now in its third year, Love Your Lenses Week is a cross-sector campaign to promote safe enjoyment of contact lenses to the UK’s five million contact lens wearers. Love your Lenses Week 2019 takes place March 23-30.
For this year’s campaign we have launched a set of experimental new tools which focus on helping eye care practitioners communicate safety messages more effectively to contact lens wearers. The new tools are the result of a GOC pilot project called Land The Message, which explored how contact lens practitioners could use behavioural science to increase the effectiveness of aftercare advice.
We undertook the Land The Message project after research in 2015 uncovered that only 48 per cent of patients recalled receiving any aftercare advice from their practitioner, which suggests that contact lens wearers do not receive information in a way that is easy to remember.
Working with industry experts, academics, behaviour change experts and patient campaigners we developed three tools for practitioners; a visual aid, a pre-appointment questionnaire and lifestyle-based questions. These were then tested in the field by four eye care practitioners as part of their routine contact lens appointments. The initial results of the testing were promising, so we are using Love Your Lenses Week 2019 as an opportunity to make the prototypes available to larger numbers of eye care practitioners to try them out for themselves.
Further information on the pilot project and the three Land The Message tools can be found at www.loveyourlenses.com/land-the-message. Anyone who wishes to get involved in Love Your Lenses Week can also download the Love Your Lenses 2019 promotional toolkit from www.loveyourlenses.com.