“It has ultimately brought about a real shift in government thinking”

I was reminded of this last month when the news broke that the Government now plans to make it mandatory for drivers, particularly those over the age of 70, to produce evidence from an optometrist that their eyesight meets the legal standard.

While there was no mention in the announcement of what spurred the change, it is scarcely a coincidence that the policy is precisely the one the AOP has been campaigning on for over seven years now, and follows within a few months of a high profile inquest into the deaths of four people in three different road traffic accidents, all involving motorists who had continued to get behind the wheel despite being told by our members that they should stop.

While there was no mention in the announcement of what spurred the change, it is scarcely a coincidence that the policy is precisely the one the AOP has been campaigning on for over seven years now

Driving change

Now this is only an announcement, and we have yet to see the timetable for the proposed Road Safety Bill, which will bring the announcement to life, let alone have the Bill be brought into effect. During my career, I have seen too many such policy pronouncements disappear again without trace, or be botched in the implementation to declare this a win quite yet. The proposal as it stands needs work too; that’s why we will be pushing hard in the days to come to advocate for five policy principles, developed alongside the College, to ensure current vision standards for driving are implemented and genuinely improve road safety.

But, to highlight a second example, the Department of Health has today (4 September) announced another policy shift that we have been agitating for, with a formal consultation for extending the powers of optometrists to supplya suite of medications to deal with common eye complaints. This would, if implemented, bring to an end the need for our members to send patients to their GP just to be given anti-allergies medications for a minor eye-ailment.

The announcements for both potential changes have been long in the making, and pursued over many years indefatigably by the team led by head of media, PR and external affairs, Serena Box - in particular our Don’t swerve a sight test, and One million appointments campaigns.

Other organisations, including The College of Optometrists and the Association of British Dispensing Opticians, have played roles in these successes too.

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Don't swerve a sight test

Learn about the AOP's vision and driving campaign highlighting the importance of good vision for driving and promoting the value of regular sight tests

What these developments do is demonstrate that political and campaigning activity are not merely exercises in ego-stroking and brand building, but are critical to building the future of the profession. Both these changes are going to extend the role of optometrists, and make it far harder for us to be sidelined and forgotten as we have frequently been in the past. Whatever the doubters say, change is possible – not easy, but possible. It takes time and persistence, certainly, but to give up without trying is defeatist.

Both these changes are going to extend the role of optometrists, and make it far harder for us to be sidelined and forgotten as we have frequently been in the past

That said, alongside persistence, there is another essential quality which we must show: pragmatism. We first had some indication that there was serious interest in taking forward proposals on vision and driving some months ago when we and The College of Optometrists were invited to discuss the detail of our proposals with officials. During that process, it became immediately apparent that for any proposition to land, it had to be quick and simple, and it was evident that any ideas which required the Government to fund new, standalone eyesight tests for drivers would be doomed to failure. Pragmatism gave us a chance of success; perfectionism would kill the idea stone dead.

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“As the examination proceeded, I knew something was wrong”

AOP Councillor, Karan Vyas, shares his experiences of breaking bad news, including driving standards conversations

On understanding this, as all good science-based organisations should do, we went back to the clinical evidence. Yes – there was room for conversations about how the General Ophthalmic Services sight test could be improved to give a more acute assessment of the precise needs of people’s vision while driving. But in truth, the clinical gains would be marginal and there was no obvious consensus about what any new sight test might include. In short, the existing test isn’t perfect, but given the choice between that and nothing, the decision was clear: more lives would be saved by introducing a mandatory sight test for drivers using the existing framework as quickly as possible than would be saved by introducing a slightly tweaked test in a decade’s time.

Of course, some of this pushes against the culture of optometry. Change-making is risky and messy, and framing arguments to appeal to politicians and policymakers cannot always be done in a precise, statistics-driven fashion. And for a profession in which minor variations in data can indicate massive, life-changing conditions, tolerance of imperfection is not easy. But as we see every day, the world in which the profession operates is changing around us. We can either do nothing and be at the mercy of those changes or we can try to influence them.