Simon Jones: Blame Canada

There’s an interesting little story from Ontario this week (https://www.opticianonline.net/news/oos-begin-dire...). Disgruntled members of the Ontario Association of Optometrists (OAO) have been urged by the professional body to refer patients to hospital eye departments or physicians for all conditions and problems outside of routine testing.

Why would they do this? ‘Decades’ of underfunding by the Ontario Ministry of Health province have left optometrists covering costs out of their own pocket and putting some practices at risk of closure, says the OAO.

The OAO enlisted the expertise of a third-party agency to estimate the cost of the referrals made by its 1,800 or so members. The figure? $250,000 per day extra to the public health system. The study also found that costs of services delivered by optometrists, including overheads and materials, cost between $80 to $90 a patient – only $30 to $40 of which was reimbursed to doctors by the government and insurance plans.