World Council of Optometry Meeting

Missed blogging for a couple of weeks as I was away in Chicago, then catching up and helping a couple of friends at their practices. Back to normal now! Chicago was an amazing place - we had a heat wave so temperatures well over 30 each day - and over 100 Fahrenheit one day too. Brilliant museums - didn't have much time in any of them - and the Adler Planetarium and the Shedd aquarium, which I went to when badly jet-lagged so don't remember much. But some brilliant displays (including the Amazon basin - can't believe how high the water comes in the rainy season)and very tranquil admiring the jellyfish. And the venue for the meeting - the ballroom at the Blackstone Renaissance Hotel on South Michigan Ave - the room was straight out of a fairy tale. The meeting's theme was "Advancing Optometry Worldwide" and presentations dealt with the levels of practice in various countries, with the aim of improving education and legislation to improve the level of optometric care world-wide. Some countries still have a huge shortage of basic eye care, but the feeling of the meeting was that, to call a person an optometrist, there needed to be a minimum standard of education involving refraction and eye health. The eye health needs to be at the level of understanding, diagnosing and (often) treating, not just "detect and refer" - noticing something out of the ordinary and sending the patient on to someone else. This has been an issue in NZ over the past decade, because my training (1980's) was at the "detect and refer" level, simply because we were not allowed to use some techniques and drugs that let us diagnose. Now we can, and we are all expected to be able to diagnose eye conditions, then treat or refer to someone appropriate. Faster, better referrals mean that the patient is served better - seeing an optometrist locally rather than waiting months to be seen at the hospital. And primary eye care, in local communities is the province of optometry. World wide.