“Optometry is a great profession to be part-time in”

Leedham, who will officially retire this March, told OT that he has benefited from the flexible working arrangements provided by Boots Opticians twice in his career: the first in 2014 after the death of his mother, when he was able to reduce his full-time contract to three, and then eventually four, days per week.

In 2020, as the concept of retirement approached, Leedham was able to change his work setup again: he moved onto an ‘annualised hours’ contract, allowing him to work 100 days within the year, with holiday and sickness entitlement and 12 monthly payslips keeping him in the loop as a full-time employee.

The concept originally came from Boots Pharmacy, which had developed annualised hours in order to draft extra resource when they needed it, Leedham explained.

For Leedham, it meant working full-time through the depths of winter – January to March – before having four months off, before returning in mid-July to assist with the summer holiday lull.

“It was great to be off during the summer, with the warmer weather. My hobbies, including being outside, walking the dog and riding motorbikes, are nicer in fair weather,” he said.

“The fact that I could be off for great swathes of April through to September or October, and only having to work four weeks in that period, was a really great attraction.”

As Leedham approached retirement, annualised hours provided a change of pace without requiring a hard stop – which he believes leads many retirees to feeling like they have very little to do with their days.

“It gave me that experience of three or four months of being at home, without any worry of work, to break into that retirement aspect,” Leedham said. “It fitted our family life at that time, to be enjoying that regime.”

He added: “We did it for four years, until such a time as I thought, ‘I’ve really enjoyed this, but now is the time to take a back seat completely.’”

Space for family life

Having recruited numerous practice staff over almost four decades of working for Boots Opticians, Leedham has seen many positive examples of flexibility around term-time and school hours contracts.

“Boots Opticians does seem to have that culture, of flexibility and employed hours,” he said.

He believes that local need might be part of the reason why flexibility has been so forthcoming at his specific practice.

Norwich “is a bit of a recruitment black spot for optometrists,” Leedham told OT. “That probably does help a little bit, when you’re putting something to them, as opposed to being an over-subscribed resource, where they can be a bit more picky.”

He added: “In my experience, in that part of the world, they are very receptive to discussions about what would work for the business and what would work for the individual.”

Two and a half hours down the coast, in the Essex town of Hadleigh, optometrist and dispensing optician, Stuart Humfrey, is also benefiting from flexible working, although from the opposite perspective: as a practice owner, he has been able to shape arrangements to suit his own requirements from the start.

In fact, the front door of Humfrey Eyecare doesn’t even feature practice opening times.

“My practice is a little bit unique,” he told OT. “It’s a bit like having a traditional house practice, but on the High Street, on quite a busy road.

“I’ve been here two years, and I started it very much with the idea of flexibility as core to the whole ethos.” 

The reality of this is that Humfrey can see patients at whatever time works for both parties – at 7.30am before a patient catches the commuter train into London, for example, or on a Sunday, the only time a visitor from Scotland who is loyal to the practice is available.

It also means that Humfrey can manage work around his commitments – specifically, the days he has his four children, one of whom has Down Sydrome and is autistic.

“He is heading towards 18, but is in a special educational needs school. He can’t catch a bus home – he’s taxied, and I pick him up. It’s proved really wonderful,” Humfrey shared.

He added: “For 26 years, I had what I might call a traditional practice with a partner, and it was very nine to five with all the staff, with Saturdays included, depending on what we were doing. That becomes very difficult if you do start to have families.”

Humfrey employs two part-time secretaries, who largely work from home, but can also work from the practice if they like. Both work three hours per day, fitting around the school run and their own family responsibilities.

“They don’t clock in or clock out,” Humfrey said. “I trust them to do their hours. In fact, I would probably find that they do more hours than I actually employ them for. Maybe a testimony to being flexible is that it does improve productivity.”

He added: “It’s nice to know that, because they have a laptop, they can go off, do a bit of shopping or something, and then come back home and carry on with where they were.

“I’m the none the wiser, because the job is being done. It works really neatly, from that point of view.”

Working on a completely flexible basis also means that Humfrey can “shut the door and walk out” of the practice at 4pm on a Thursday, to take up his shift at the local hospital, where he spends evenings assisting with laser corrective surgeries.

“There is nothing on the door that gives a time,” he said. “It is truly flexible working hours, and I base that around the patient. My secretaries know my life and my schedule very well now, and if they need to be seen at a particular time, I can fit them in.”

He added: “Patients think that I’m going over and above. In fact, I’ve done myself a favour, because I’ve probably got time elsewhere. I can juggle my day and fit around things that I want to be able to do during the day.”

I would probably find that they do more hours than I actually employ them for. Maybe a testimony to being flexible is that it does improve productivity

Technology in aiding flexibility

On booking an appointment with Humfrey Eyecare, patients receive an algorithmically-generated door code that allows them to let themselves into the practice.

In fact, technology is the tool that underpins the flexibility that the practice is built upon.

A voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone system means Humfrey can work from anywhere – including Tenerife, where his daughter and granddaughter live.

“I can go to Tenerife, and I can make calls from this very phone, and it’s a local number, as far as the patient is concerned,” he told OT.

“Once I phoned a patient, and I said I wasn’t in the practice at the moment. They said, ‘Oh, where are you?’ I'm always quite honest, so I said, ‘I’m in Tenerife.’ It turned out they were here too, just down the road.”

His written records are digitally scanned post-appointment, and attached via pdf to the patient’s Optisoft record.

Humfrey explained: “The paper is then all shredded; everything I’ve got is on the Cloud. It means that when I am in Tenerife and a patient does contact me because they’ve got a problem with their vision or anything else, I can write a referral letter, because I’ve got my original scanned notes immediately at my fingertips.”

He adds that his VoIP costs just £17 a month.

“To pay somebody to be there for £17 a month, 24/7, with all of the different answers, emailing me, and doing a transcript – you couldn’t,” he said.

“If you want to be flexible, utilising technology is almost inevitable. It underpins everything.”

Optimum conditions for flexibility

Both Humfrey and Leedham believe that optometry is an occupation that lends itself well to flexible working.

“Optometry is a great profession to be part-time in,” Leedham said.

“Equally, I enjoyed being full-time when I was younger. It’s a very flexible profession to be in, and to be able to fit your needs in with what the needs of the business are, if you get the right support.”

He emphasises that, with clinical and technological developments and evolving shared care schemes changing the profession quickly in recent years, staying up to date with continuing professional development is vital.

“The pressure on optometrists these days, in terms of expectations on the employees working full-time, does get quite stressful at times,” he said.

“I was glad to be able to have some time away, to be able to get away from that constant pressure of being at work full-time, all the time.”

In fact, Leedham believes that full retirement might have come earlier had he not been able to work flexibly in the run-up to it.

He reflected: “I would have been a bit more counting the days down, I think, looking forward to the day when I could actually say that was enough. It might have happened a bit sooner.”

Humfrey’s positive feelings towards flexible working centre on the amount of freedom that it has given him.

“I’m able to work at my own pace, and at the hours I’d like to work,” he said, adding: “We’re in a profession where we’re only seeing patients every year, or every two years. Their experience of us as a practice is often very perfunctory. They don’t know that I have booked off three days to go away with my caravan.

“In the early days, I was a bit stressed about it all, thinking, ‘I can’t go away. I’ve got a new business.’ But now, I’m much more relaxed. Nobody ever complains. They just book for the day that I’m there and available. I feel a lot less stressed at work as a result of being able to plan my own calendar.”

OT asked Leedham what he plans to do, once he has removed himself from the register and hung up his ophthalmoscope for good.

“Just to sit back and relax, and enjoy the grandchildren,” he said. “We lost the dog back in May 2023, so now we’ll get another one, and just enjoy the next 10, 15, or 20 years, hopefully.”

Maybe it’s time to find new ways to enjoy that East Anglia countryside, too?

“I did a little bit of grape picking last year, which was very different,” Leedham revealed.

He added: “The grape harvest is very different to being in the consulting room – but it was nice to do something completely different.”