With all the talk of educational excellence it’s good to be reminded by Judy Lea that optometry and dispensing are caring professions.
As the General Optical Council’s Education Strategic Review draws to a conclusion a clear understanding is emerging that optometry graduates need to have more hands on clinical experience to ready them for a life in practice. Universities rightly want the brightest students to keep their marks high and their reputations intact but should a caring profession judge students on academic achievement alone?
Recent years have seen A-level grades become the be all and end all of university admission but the issue of how the next generation of optical professionals is chosen must be considered.
Some of the new uni courses which have been set up in recent years have talked about the need for older students, more vocationally biased courses, offers of places to mature students who may have worked in optical practice but are late developers in their academic careers.
It would be interesting to see to what extent this type of undergraduate is being attracted on to degree programmes or whether the character of university intakes has remained the same.
The GOC has made it clear that it holds no responsibility for the employment model of optics and it accredits courses that meet the standards. Universities want to turn out students with good degrees and that means passing exams. Professional compassion is an issue for the profession.
There’s no doubt that excellent clinicians can be caring professionals and that higher qualifications and continued learning are no bar to compassion. Clinical skills can be learned and education can be mandated. Compassion is a more innate quality that the profession should value and include as a skillset the professionals of the future should possess.