Crisis? What crisis?

Turn the clock back to 1997 and employers were warning of a serious shortage in optometric manpower and pushing for radical changes to the structure of the profession to avert the crisis it faced.

Yet just two years later there were calls for controls on student intake and warnings of an imminent oversupply of optometrists following steep rises in the numbers of students entering the universities and the creation of new courses at Ulster and Anglia.

At that time, Optician hosted an open meeting to examine manpower and recruitment and invited the profession to take part. Among employers, there were those who argued market forces should decide the quantity and quality of recruits to the profession. It was shortage, not oversupply, of optometrists that reduced quality and drove up salaries, they said.