CL awareness week to focus on safety

This year’s Love Your Lenses Week will focus on how practitioners can communicate safety messages more effectively to contact lens wearers.

Ahead of the awareness week, which will run from 23–30 March, the General Optical Council (GOC) will launch a new set of tools that have been developed to aid aftercare conversations with contact lens patients.

The new tools follow on from a Land The Message pilot project run by the GOC to explore how contact lens practitioners could use behavioural science to increase the effectiveness of aftercare advice. It was established after research by the regulator found a significant difference between how much aftercare advice practitioners were reported to be providing and how many patients recalled receiving it.

The tools have been tested by four practitioners as part of their routine contact lens appointments. The regulator reported promising initial results, with 95% of patients recalling receiving aftercare information if one of the tools was used during the contact lens appointment.

Having tested the tools, dispensing optician Keith Tempany, said he found it “enlightening.”

“This is a way of ensuring the safety of our patients. A lot of the patients have also found it very useful,” he added.

Love Your Lenses Week, which is now in its third year, is an annual contact lens awareness campaign run by the GOC in collaboration with industry partners and patient groups.

Speaking about the awareness week, director of strategy at the GOC, Alistair Bridge, said: “This year we are using Love Your Lenses Week as an opportunity to help registrants help their patients to wear their contact lenses safely. We’re encouraging practitioners to use the awareness week to try out new ways of landing contact lens safety messages directly with the public during fittings and aftercare appointments. The new tools and training resources on the website are potentially a great way for our registrants to get the ball rolling.”

The three Land The Message tools, as well as a promotional toolkit can be downloaded from the campaign’s website. 

Image credit: Getty