By now many of you will be thinking about holidays and will leave behind correspondence and professional journals littering your desk. Spare a moment to plan to engage in what is the most important consultation exercise undertaken for optometry. This is the final “Call to Action” by NHS England. Responses are due in by September 12.
Most optometrists know what to do to improve NHS care, meet healthcare needs and build an excellent NHS for future generations. But have you told anyone ? You have experienced patients, situations, outcomes and concerns and thought; could do better. Whether its your own clinical decision making, the lack of response of your local eye unit or the lack of competence displayed to your patient by others (what is it about GP’s and eyes ?), you have an opinion. Use it.
It is important to promote grass roots opinion because it is the very nature of membership bodies to be innately conservative, especially when a push for political advancement risks upsetting the extremes of a largely self interested corporate retail sector and the advances made fostering a close working relationship with HES.
What might you be saying ? Well, start with the GOS, because apart from the GOS 3 voucher the rest isn’t worth the blue paper its written on. Our negotiators have seemed paralysed in making a good enough case for a new contract previously and there is nothing on the horizon to suggest anything different. Fire up the Quattro and let loose with some really radical suggestions.
First a comprehensive and funded upgrade enabling GOS to deliver what we are trained to do permitting, enabling and encouraging repeat measures and returns for dilation placed on the judgement of the optometrist and not on sticking plaster, postcode lottery, repeat measures schemes. It’s not the low fee that’s the issue it’s the ridiculous contract that rewards lowest common denominator behaviour.
Secondly, more controversially, insist that all non-emergency ophthalmic referrals (whether from GP or optical sector) are routed via specialist optometrists accredited and administered through LOC’s. There is no need for complex primary care centres staffed by ophthalmologists of which there are too few or GP’s who lack the competence or interest in matters ophthalmic.
Third upskill an enlarged cohort of IP optometrists to become the GP of the eye and fund them to deliver the non-surgical, non-sight threatening eye disease in primary care needed to deliver real savings.