How many charity collection boxes do you have in your practice? Do you make a point of supporting any specific local or national charities within the practice? Do these charities resonate with your patients?
One of the hardest things that anyone in a healthcare setting must do is to admit defeat when it comes to assisting a patient. I remember many years ago talking to an ophthalmologist and him telling me how difficult it was to have the conversation with a patient telling them that they were going to lose their sight and there was nothing that could be done to prevent this. I remember him saying that this type of conversation was tantamount to admitting failure and this was always a very hard thing to do. No matter how smart the technology is that we have at our disposal nowadays, these inevitable moments will still occur and, no doubt, that feeling of helplessness will still prevail.
To that end it is, therefore, pointless to avoid these inevitable moments. Learning to embrace them and attempt to create a positive angle would seem to be a potentially good way to proceed. With this in mind, I saw a television advert the other day for the national charity Guide Dogs. It led me to think about how we as a practice, and how practices in general, approach donations to charities.
As we are all probably well aware charities have suffered tremendously during the periods of lockdown. Income for many charities reached a critically low level during this period and their activities have been seriously curtailed as a result. Guide Dogs has always had one great asset when it comes to fundraising and that is the delightful fluffy puppies starting their journey to becoming a fully fledged guide dog.
Everybody knows the benefits these wonderful animals bring to so many thousands of individuals and, in a profession where we know that those individuals requiring a guide dog may often be well beyond the scope of our activities, I do wonder how many practices actively support this organisation.
The television advert states that £1 a week will sponsor a puppy on its two-year journey to complete its training. £1 a week equates to just £52 a year. A paltry sum for each and every optical outlet, which is probably tax deductible anyway. I think we should all be looking at least doubling, if not quadrupling this sum. What is more, it presents the practice with a fantastic opportunity to get its own patients involved with their puppy’s journey. What a great addition to your reception area, the regular updates on your practices guide puppy as it works its way to becoming a fully trained guide dog. What a great opportunity to show your patients the extent of your care for both the fully sighted and the sight-impaired people of your local community. How many of your junior patients would be fascinated and delighted to follow the journey of ‘their’ puppy?
We spend so much of each of our working days improving the sight of those who need appliances to help them see clearer and therefore function more effectively but how much of our working day do we dedicate to those who are beyond our help? I suspect it is generally very little. The Guide Dogs charity gives us all that opportunity. I am fully aware there are many other charities associated with sight loss and associated eye diseases but Guide Dogs offers us all a tangible opportunity not only to involve ourselves but also those who attend our practices.
I am not an advocate specifically for Guide Dogs and I would not advocate doing away with your other charity boxes, if you have any, but I see the opportunity for both the charity and optometrists within their practices to benefit from supporting Guide Dogs. Maybe there is an opportunity to appoint a member of staff to specifically be responsible for communicating the progress of ‘the practice puppy’ to attendees at the practice through a newsletter or website.
More and more nowadays, people choose the outlets they frequent in accordance with their own social attitudes and values. Practices that can attune themselves to those same attitudes and values with an understanding of the importance of social care values being the ones that will succeed in a modern self-aware environment. We are already more aware of the green agenda entering our sphere of activity with many practices offering recycling schemes for items such as disposable contact lenses. That social awareness extends to charitable support as well.
Over recent months this column has highlighted a number of threats and negatives confronting our profession. This month, I hope, offers an opportunity to reflect on ways that we can assist in helping those we may not, in our normal sphere of practice, be able to help greatly with only a small financial outlay but with a clear demonstration of support for this sector. What have we got to lose versus what others stand to gain?