Give Me My Pupillary Distance
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| THE CAMPAIGN FOR A BETTER DEAL FOR GLASSES WEARERS |
| One simple change to the eye-test prescription would make it easier for you to get the best possible glasses for the best possible price. Please read on to find out why, and what you can do to help make it happen.
Click here Give Me My PD to sign our online petition. The GOC is acting against the interests of UK glasses wearers. In the mid-1980s the government attempted to increase the amount of competition and choice available to spectacle wearers by instructing the General Optical Council (GOC) to relax the regulations governing who was allowed to advertise and sell prescription glasses. The government’s intention was to ensure that everyone who wears glasses should have access to the widest possible choice of frames and lenses at the most competitive prices. The actual effect of the deregulation process so far has been to create a marketplace dominated by the High Street multiples with no measurable reduction in the real cost of glasses to UK consumers. One reason that glasses are still so expensive is that consumers are not provided with complete prescription information following a sight examination which would give them full freedom of choice to shop for their glasses wherever they choose. The missing piece of information is called the Pupillary Distance or PD. It takes an optometrist just seconds to take this measurement during a sight examination but, under current GOC regulations, your PD measurement does not have to be recorded and provided to you on your prescription form. Your Pupillary Distance – and Why it Matters. Your prescription is in-effect a set of instructions to make your glasses. There is no legitimate medical, health or safety related reason for omitting the PD from your prescription form: this is an unethical and blatantly anti-competitive practice. The General Optical Council determines what information opticians are required to write on your prescription form following an eye examination. The Council’s failure to include the PD measurement makes it difficult for you to buy your glasses from anyone but the optometrist who conducted your eye-test, or from another High Street optician where the measurement can be taken at the point-of-sale. By this omission the General Optical Council is effectively sustaining a “High Street monopoly” on the supply and sale of prescription glasses. Adding Insult to Injury. It is simply inconceivable to most people that we would allow ourselves to be coerced into buying our medicines from the doctor who carries out our health examination? So why are the government and the GOC colluding in this coercion of consumers into purchasing their glasses from the same person who examines their eyes? The General Optical Council says “Buying Glasses Online is Safe”. In fact, what the deputy chief registrar of the GOC actually said at the annual conference of the Association of British Dispensing Opticians (ABDO) in October 2009 was: “The Department of Health has been presented with no evidence from the industry to show that de-regulation of spectacle sales has resulted in any harm to the public which might lead to a review of the current regulatory framework”. Indeed, he went further, and warned ABDO members that any attempt to re-open the issue could actually result in further de-regulation. In other words, it could be argued that the market could be freer still, and customers would still be perfectly safe. You can read the report of his speech 2 http://www.opticianonline.net/Articles/2009/Re-regulation unlikely in age of internet If the GOC is saying that buying glasses online is safe then why are they not ACTIVELY DE-REGULATING to make it easier for consumers by including the Pupillary Distance on prescriptions? We believe this constitutes clear and irrefutable evidence that the GOC is not acting in the interest of consumers and we demand that the Westminster and Scottish Governments act accordingly. More Customers are Complaining about Opticians than Ever Before. In September 2009 the Optical Consumer Complaints Service (OCCS) reported that complaints to this consumer watchdog had risen by 35% on the previous year. These included complaints about the failure of ..“practices to comply with requests for prescriptions and refusal to measure the interpupillary distance”! read the full report 3 http://www.opticianonline.net/Articles/2009/Optical complaints up by more than a third Increasing Number of Consumers are Buying Glasses Online with full Confidence. The impact of the growing trend towards online shopping generally is increasingly being felt in the optical sector. Not only are the anti-competitive practices of the mainstream optical industry failing to stem this growth they are actively bringing the profession into disrepute as evidenced by the increasing number of complaints to consumer bodies. Online retailers of prescription glasses are providing consumers with help and guidance on how to measure their PD by themselves when it is refused by the optometrist who carried out their eye test. Unfortunately the effect of an opticians refusal to provide a PD when requested is to create a lasting bad impression of eye-care professionals in the eyes of the general public, for no good reason. In the interests of everyone who wears glasses (which is most of us at some point in our lives) we urge you to sign our petition today. Click here Give Me My PD to sign our online petition.
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I have a Opticians in Enfield called goodlooking optics anybody that needs a pd just pop in and ask for Garry Kousoulou. Happy to help you
Great stuff. There more accurate the information available to people about their eyes the better the eyecare will ultimately be. We’re all in favour!
How ridiculous and obtuse you all are. A world without skilled practitioners will be carnage, with the woes of undue prismatic effect causing problems everywhere. But at least you get cheap spectacles! Why don’t we de-regulate gas fitting and all put our own heating systems and gas fires in…..tick tock tick tock BANG!
Should PD’s be given as part of an Rx then your right, the cost of spectacles would plummet. I also believe the quality would also be directly affected (but that is actually a side issue).
An optician receives about £20 for a sight test from the NHS. not even nearly the actual cost and so this is put onto the spectacles. All that would happen is the cost of a sight test would go up.
You would then be forced to pay a premium for a sight test every two years before you could buy new glasses.
If ‘there is no legitimate medical, health or safety related reason for omitting the PD from your prescription form’ then why do you need it at all? If you are going to produce spectacles with a PD that somebody else has taken, you may as well have a good old guess – it’ll be about as useful.
i have now been working in optics for 3 years and will be the first to admit i am not a registered or qualified optom or even a do. but deal with a massive amount of optical issues in my day to day working environment. within these 3 years i have also been a optical lab manager and know how important the relevance of a accurate pd is all glazing experts. you wouldnt get the problem of the glasses not working if you went to a main retail store because if you did have a non tolerance to the prescription or infact your pupil distance the remake and remeasurement cost would be met by the supplier which in most cases would be the case if you ordered specs off the internet. would they send someone to retake your pd? would they pay for a retest? no is the honest answer. and every high street opticians have the ability to take a pd. is is something we all can do if shown the correct way. you get more customer focus and service from each high street optician then you ever could off the internet. its just too impersonal.
this may only me my opinion but its how i see things through me experience anyway.
kind regards.
Just ordered a pair of Tom Ford £200ish glasses for £29 through a code on a money saving website. I couldn’t find my PD on my eye test from earlier this year but just held a ruler up to my eyes in a mirror, 65mm I made it. Not professional but at less than £30 I’m not going to complain.
Opticians are cartels, if prices were a bit cheaper we’d buy glasses like we buy shoes, whenever we want to, instead of thinking I’ll wait another year.
that PD will be no where near your actual PD. if your not trained to take one then it will never be accurate. as stated before i am not a optom nor am i a DO but i have been trained by a optom to take pds as well as an aweful lot of other bits a pieces along the way. depending on your prescription, if you pd is too far out you will start to get unwanted prism. which is something you really dont want unless prescribed too you.
as a qualified optometrist, I completely agree that spectacles cost too much. However, this article is completely ignorant to the realities of the situation. The alternative would be a completely free market where anybody could sell specs. however, without the cross subsidy spectacle sales provide, the sight test would have to be charged at a minimum of £70. The NHS only pays us £20 pound currently and, I dare say, private patients would not be too keen on this rise. I guarantee fewer people would have sight tests, leaving children with lazy eyes, and adults with undetected macula degeneration, glaucoma, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, neurological disorders, skin cancer etc. May I suggest that if you will embark on such a crusade, possibly take a moment to value the work of the optometric profession. Frankly, to suggest that we are ‘paid to provide a prescription’ severely undervalues the work that we do. The skills required to establish a prescription can be taught in just a few months. The 4-5 years of training we do is essentially to maximise and preserve sight
I love how the “dinosaurs” try to protect their turf. In the USA we have similar laws, and, just like in the UK, the eye doctors often refuse to give patients their PD.
We don’t have national healthcare yet (it doesn’t happen fully until 2013), but a good eye exam will cost you $100 (approx. £65). If a doctor cannot make a profit on seeing two or three dozen patients a day, which translates to between USD 600,000 to 900,000 annually, then they are doing something wrong, and need to change their business model.
Times change. Businesses change. Get over it. Adapt or be gone.