Madam, - There is a simple way to reduce the two-year waiting time for a first appointment at children's eye clinics (The Irish Times, August 4th) and that is to utilise the services of optometrists (ophthalmic opticians).
We are already trained and positioned in the community to screen all children with a suspected abnormality in their eyes and remove those who don't, thereby reducing the eye clinic waiting-time. For example, there is no need for a 10-year-old who has trouble seeing the blackboard due to simple short sight to visit an ophthalmologist, yet children with such simple problems are routinely referred to hospital by their GP or school-based vision screeners, clogging up the system unnecessarily.
Having worked as an optometrist for 15 years, the past 10 in Ireland, I have seen many children with either normal or basic short sight referred by the school system and GPs, whose parents do not want to wait two years and who can't (or won't) pay the €120 fee for a private consultation with an ophthalmologist.
The problem is that the HSE provides financial assistance only to those children who have a spectacle prescription from a public eye clinic or a private ophthalmologist, and therein lies the rub. On the one hand the current system cannot cope with the numbers attending. On the other hand ophthalmologists benefit from this predicament by seeing patients privately whose parents or guardians are willing to pay. Bizarrely, children who attend their local optician for examination and glasses, if required, receive no assistance whatsoever even though they are doing the Government a favour by not going on the waiting lists.
A universal voucher system should be introduced for an eye examination by an optometrist. This would be very efficient and cost-effective (a quarter of the cost of an appointment with a consultant ophthalmologist). - Yours, etc,
JOSEPH O'SULLIVAN, Mount Rochford Rise, Balbriggan, Co Dublin.