From Boots pre-reg of the year to clinical director and franchisee

I first went to university with a plan to become a PE teacher.

I was studying for a sport and exercise science degree. But by the time I was close to finishing, I knew I didn’t want to go into that area. I continued with the degree and did fairly well, even though my heart wasn’t really in it.

I have to thank my sister, Jessica, for giving me the chance to get into the optical industry.

She was, at the time, an area manager for a couple of the QK Optical practices, and is now one of the directors. I started working at QK Optical as an optical consultant, to keep me going after I’d finished university. At that point, the director at the time said, ‘You should go and do optometry.’ I had never thought about it before then.

After working as an optical consultant for quite a short while, I started the optometry degree.

I had been working, but not fully knowing the job. Luckily, I fell on my feet and found out I really liked it. Academically, I was okay, and I fitted into it well. I was lucky I had the opportunity to do it, but that I enjoyed it as well. I noticed, back at university, that there were a lot of people coming into optometry later in life. It’s not uncommon to find your career a bit later on with optometry, I think. I finished my optometry degree in 2022.

We are QK Optical Holdings, which operates two companies, and among that is eight stores.

We’ve got a QK Optical Lincolnshire arm, and that’s the original QK Optical, and then we’ve a QK Optical Yorkshire arm, which is our new stores, which we acquired in 2024 and 2025. They're all under our banner, but it’s a Boots Opticians franchise, with eight stores in total.

I completed my pre-registration placement with QK Optical’s Scunthorpe practice, and finished it fairly quickly.

I started in September, and sat the July objective structured clinical examinations. It was a tough year, because I had a newborn. Everyone was saying, ‘Oh, it’s not a great idea.’ But you don’t always plan for these things, do you? I have to shout out to my partner, because I had taken on a lot there. Because we had a baby, I wanted to get pre-reg done as quick as possible, so I could get my evenings back after I put the baby to bed. I also won Boots Opticians pre-reg of the year in 2023.

I finished my pre-reg placement in 2023, and started practising in the group as a newly-qualified optometrist.

Around 12 months in, one of the managers at one of the practices that I was working at left. So, there was an opportunity to become an optometrist-manager. I knew I wanted to be a franchisee eventually, but I had thought that it would come later, when the opportunity presented. I didn’t think it would happen this quickly.

I was offered the optometrist-manager job at the Horncastle practice.

It is a very small, one testing room practice, but it was still completely new to me, because I’d only been qualified a year. I was still finding my feet testing, and then all of a sudden, I was a manager as well. That threw me right in at the deep end, because I was dealing with all sorts of things that were nothing to do with eyes: people coming to me with personal problems, conflicts within the team, and so on. I think I did quite well. We broke some of our records, key performance indicator-wise. We were doing good things for patients and the community, and we were hitting our own targets.

Whilst I was optometrist-manager, I was nominated by my director for the Hull and Humber Top 30 Under 30 award.

It’s a year-long cycle, identifying 30 leaders in business under 30 for the region. It’s full of people from completely different areas. I don’t think they have many clinical people included – it’s mainly from the big companies. It’s a leadership course – you go once a month, and they have coaches and speakers. It was about developing leadership coaching, and how to have difficult conversations with people. So, it’s been quite handy.

I was optometrist-manager for just over a year, and then in spring 2025, there was an opportunity to join as a franchisee.

At the beginning of May, I became a franchisee. My new role is clinical director of all eight practices, which again feels massively out of my comfort zone. I’m responsible, clinically, for everything. I still liaise with the managing director. He’s an optometrist himself, so if I have any queries, I bounce ideas off him – but I try to do as much as I can myself.

I spend a lot of time in Boots Opticians Horncastle and Boots Opticians Scunthorpe, and I am sometimes covering the West Yorkshire stores, including Pontefract.

I’m still testing, so I do fill in here and there. Me and the other three directors all live just outside of Hull. It’s perfectly placed, because an hour one way, we’ve got all the Lincolnshire stores, and then an hour the other way, I’ve got the West Yorkshire stores.

We’re changing systems at the moment, so I’m the clinical lead on that.

We’ve got some new dry eye treatments, so I’m trying to get the team on that. I’ve also rolled out Optomap. I’m responsible for my team of optometrists – eight or nine of them. It’s quite daunting, sometimes, having one to ones with them, because they’ve been testing longer than they care to admit. Having those constructive feedback sessions can be a bit of a challenge. They have got more experience than me, but I’m just throwing out healthy new ideas. I don’t tell anyone this or that – I just get conversations going with them. It has been a whirlwind, to be honest.

In Horncastle, we are part of the community optometrist triage, assessment and treatment service (COTATS).

In the area, routine referrals are triaged, and then rather than being sent to the hospital, they are sent out to different optometry practices in the community.

I’m the COTATS provider in the Horncastle area. Patients will be triaged, sent to me, and then I’ll see them and decide whether they do need to go to hospital. There’s quite a demand, in that area, for enhanced services. It’s quite a forward-looking enhanced service – it’s the best I’ve seen.

Because I work over quite a few different areas, I see a wide array of things.

We were presented with the opportunity to go onto the COTATS service in Lincolnshire. The local optical committee (LOC) is quite advanced in that area. The hospital is swamped, so COTATS optometrists triage all these routine referrals. If it’s something that needs to go to hospital, for example paediatrics, or if there’s a lump on the eyelid that has been seen before and we know needs to be removed, that goes straightaway. But all other routine cases are seen by us, and we act as a filtering service.

The local primary care team advised us that we should expect about 20% of people to go onwards, and that as long as we are below that mark, it’s cost effective. We are well below that mark, because a lot of these cases don’t need to go to hospital, because they are routine. We are reimbursed fairly, I would say, for that service.

I’ve just started my independent prescribing (IP) qualification.

The LOC put out some information on applying for the professional certificate in glaucoma and the IP, which were both fully funded. I applied for them both, and got both, which I didn’t expect. I turned down the professional certificate in glaucoma, because they recommended not doing them at the same time, and took on IP, because that’s the one I’m most interested in.

I was planning to do it over a year, but I spoke with the module lead, and explained my situation, and they said that it would be too much work. So, I’m doing it over two years, after listening the experts. It’s nice, because it's fully funded by the local NHS. I’ve just started that, in October 2025, so I’m very new to it.

We want to be at the forefront of enhanced services.

We want to be there, ready and waiting for the services if they are commissioned. It's like a lottery, at the moment – certain areas have good services; certain areas don’t have any. But in all our areas, even though they all work so differently, we want to be ready and waiting. If these enhanced services come about, or if they get even more enhanced, we are there, with all our optometrists qualified, confident, and ready to see patients in the community, saving them going to hospital. That’s the main goal, clinically.

It has been like a catapult over the past year or two – it’s all come at once.

I’m still in the early stages of my career, and I’m very much learning on the job and throwing myself in at the deep end. I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of opportunities, but I have embraced a lot of opportunities as well. I’m constantly out of my comfort zone – but that’s how you develop. Every day is a learning day, and every day is something different. I’m just trying to embrace it.