“We must cling hard to the values of dignity and respect which underpin all professional practice”

Personally, I have never understood why the saying was meant to be a curse: after all, who wants to live in boring times rather than interesting ones?

At least until now. Even for someone as prone to intellectual restlessness as I am, the barrage of seismic events of the past few years – the 2008 crash, Brexit, COVID-19, the Ukraine war, and now the spiralling chaos in the Middle East – have left me with a quiet yearning for a touch of boredom.

What is happening in the Middle East perhaps seems a long way from the day-to-day work of optometry and the AOP. But even here, we feel the resonance of foreign events. The mixing of the national with the religious, which underpins not just the conflicts in the Middle East but also the tensions between India and Pakistan, can create something of a toxic cocktail. And given the national heritages and religious beliefs of many optometrists, it is perhaps inevitable that some of the pain and bitterness to which those conflicts give rise will seep into the way some AOP members approach their life and work in the UK.

In the main, the tensions which some individuals are experiencing are being managed in the way I have got to know is typical of the profession: calmly, logically and with the commitment to the values of respect and decency that are embedded in every optometrist.

However, just occasionally, we have begun to see these tensions creep into interactions on social media. I am not myself in any optometry forums – as a non-optometrist, that is not my space – but I have been shown some of the exchanges and have noted references to religion and national identity beginning to feature in some of the more vigorous debates which occasionally break out on these platforms.

Once in a while, we are approached by members asking us to intervene – and, of course, if these were forums where we had the power to moderate, we would do so. However, we are not a regulator, and it is not within the AOP’s role to police how our members choose to express themselves.

Yet optometry does have a regulator in the GOC, which has shown a willingness to mount fitness to practise cases against individuals whose social media actions have crossed the boundaries of acceptable professional behaviour. While cases are still relatively rare, our legal and regulatory team has seen an increasing number of instances where members have been deemed to have brought the profession into disrepute by what they have said on social media sites. The boundaries of what is and what is not acceptable are not always easy to discern, but optometrists using social media sites and forums for these purposes need to know that they are risking having to defend the words they have used in front of a fitness to practise panel.

In the end, it should not be merely fear of what the regulator might do that stops us abusing our fellow professionals in chatrooms. As I say, optometry – like all healthcare services – is built on clear, ethical principles. We may well disagree with each other, and not always like each other, but we must cling hard to the values of dignity and respect which underpin all professional practice. There is enough pain and suffering elsewhere in the world at the moment without us inflicting it on each other here in the UK.