Eye problem? Should have gone to your High Street spec sellers

If you’ve been watching the recent BBC Scotland series The Family Doctors, you’ll have seen what sort of pressure NHS GPs are under.

One doctor uses a 10-minute timer for each appointment so she can fit in all the patients on her daily schedule.

Another tries to take on a part-time teaching post, leaving his colleagues fretting about who will handle his patients.

Across the NHS we’re having to come up with ingenious ways to make resources go further to help our generally ageing population.

The days where nurses were “the handmaiden of the doctor” are consigned to the past, and now nurses, among other things, run specialist clinics.

These do a wide range of tasks that doctors used to take care of – monitoring asthma, doing diabetes tests and keeping an eye on heart problems, as well as assessing and prescribing for certain urgent problems.

We want to “signpost” patients to go to these clinics rather than make an appointment with the GP.

Signposting means that patients see the most appropriate health professional for their problem, so we’re also now aiming to get people with eye problems to go to their optician rather than the GP.

More accurately we’re trying to get folk to visit their optometrist, who are based in High Street opticians.

Companies like Specsavers, Vision Express and the like aren’t just glasses salespeople, you see. They now have NHS contracts to carry out eye health checks, and they’re rather good at it.

So if you have a bit of redness or dryness then ask them to have a look.

Optometrists have a four-year specialist degree behind them, so they know what they’re talking about. They also have a wide range of gadgets and contraptions to assess your eye health.

As a result, your average optometrist can recommend the best course of action better than I can.

Optometrists will even give you an emergency appointment if you have a more urgent eye problem, and if they can’t make space they’ll direct you to one who can.

Increasingly, they are being trained to prescribe certain eye medicines too. In the future it’s hoped they’ll carry out injections for those with wet macular degeneration, taking pressure off hospital eye clinics.

Bear it in mind if you’ve got an eye complaint in future.