Simon Jones: Witness the fitness

Readers often say the first thing they do when receiving Optician is to flick to the news pages to see if any of their industry peers has been up before one of the General Optical Council’s fitness to practise committees.

Recent cases involving practitioners that have caught the attention of the mainstream media show just how damaging a fitness to practise process can be for a registrant. Not just professionally or financially, but personally too. To me, that personal side of a GOC investigative process is often lost on those reading from afar, but each case reported in Optician should act as a reminder of the standards registrants must operate in.