Panel: Results of workforce study indicate opportunity for optometry

Issue: August 2014

PHILADELPHIA – Here at Optometry’s Meeting, a panel presented results of the National Eye Care Workforce Study and predicted an increased need for medical eye care.

The American Optometric Association and the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry recently released the results of the study, which concluded that there would be an oversupply of eye care providers through 2025.

Panelist and former AOA President Randolph Brooks, OD, FAAO, outlined the basics of the study, which evaluated the overall supply of and demand for eye care.

"There appears to be an adequate supply of eye doctors – ODs and MDs – to meet the public's need for eye care now and into the future," Brooks said. "We're going to see an increase in demand for eye care in the coming years. We're anticipating growth in the population in terms of raw numbers. We're also anticipating that the population will shift toward more aging adults, and they're going to demand more than their younger cohorts in terms of eye health care.”

Brooks said the federal mandate providing eye health and vision care for children will positively affect demand, as will the increased prevalence expected for diabetes type 2.

He also said the study determined that an increase of types of eye health services correlates with the demand for the services.

As a new feature, the study measured supply by asking respondents about their excess capacity for additional visits per week.

Brooks noted that optometrists responded that they could see an additional 19.8 patients per week.

The panel said that the study results presented various opportunities for optometry

“It appears that the opportunity is in medical eye care," panelist and AOA Board of Trustee member Steven Loomis, OD, said. "Optometry's well positioned to provide that medical eye care."

"This profession has prepared for an entire generation – 30 years or more – to deliver comprehensive eye care and health care in terms of passing scope of practice laws, in terms of training our students years before the laws changed to provide these services," panelist and former AOA President Kevin Alexander, OD, PhD, FAAO, said.

The workforce study predicts an explosion of need in medical eye care services, he said, and, “Now is our time. The profession is ready.”

"One of the substories is that ophthalmology is not going to grow its workforce," panelist David A. Heath, OD, EdM, FAAO, acknowledged. "There’s going to be a gap and shift that was traditionally considered ophthalmological territory that can easily be picked up by optometry."

The panel also described the computer model that was used to analyze the data.

"One of the elegant aspects of the study is that the assumptions are clearly laid out," Heath said. "You don't necessarily have to reevaluate the entire study. You can take individual planning assumptions and find second data points and see whether the trend is correct or not correct. We've got a great starting point from one point in time, but in some ways, there's no way you're going to know whether our projections or trends are correct until you start measuring a second point and third point."

Though there are no plans to rework the data yet, according to the panelists, more accurate data from implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) might create a need.

"We made assumptions about ACA," Alexander said. "Who knows? We did our best and we used the best information that we had, but 6 months from now we may have better data. So, within maybe a year, we may see that our assumptions were way off the mark and we need to fine tune this thing."

"Out of 3,919 optometrists who actually received the survey, 722 usable responses were returned for an 18.1% response rate," panelist Jennifer Spangler said. "These responses provided a 95% confidence interval and overall error rate of

± 3.6." – by Chelsea Frajerman