BLOG: 3 ways to prepare for a child's first eye exam

One of the most difficult things you can prepare for as an optometrist is a child’s first eye exam. Not only can eye exams be especially scary – particularly if the child you’re seeing is extremely young – unprepared children in an office full of expensive instruments and a complete stranger poking them in the eye can be a recipe for disaster.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to make that first eye exam go smoothly, and none of them will take too much time out of your busy schedule.

Prepare your patient forms correctly. In many cases, you can correctly guess (or are explicitly told without prompting) whether or not it will be a child’s first eye exam. However, this will not always be the case – especially if this child and/or their parent is a new patient – and you need to set up your practice correctly to prepare for this inevitable eventuality.

One way you can do this is by adding a “first-time patient” field on your patient forms. Although most offices supply a “When was your last eye exam” field, this can often be slightly vague and in many cases will be skipped over by those filling out the exam. Giving the young patient’s parents the opportunity to explicitly tell you that this is their first time at the optometrist will give you the chance to head them off at the pass and start the preparation process for the first-time patient.

Utilize your website. Try searching in Google for “how to prepare your child for their first eye exam” and see how many entries pop up. As you’ll see, this question is asked thousands of times per day – in person and online – meaning there is a dearth of answers to a question that absolutely needs answering. That’s why it’s extremely important that you provide the exact information your patients need on your most powerful tool as an optometrist: Your website.

Simply creating a section on your site that caters to parents – by offering lists of what your examinations include, as well as checklists for what they should do to prepare their children– not only can make your job easier as an optometrist, it can also be a creative way to attract new patients to your practice. Just make sure to optimize the pages as best as possible so you can gain maximum exposure.

Talk to the parents in person (or over the phone). If you are able to find out ahead of time that your new patient is at the optometrist’s office for the first time, nothing is more effective for new patient preparation than simply calling the parents. Fill them in on all the things you do and what instruments you will be using, all while giving them a rough schedule of how the appointment will go. Ask them to tell their child these things so they’re not off-put when they come into the office; you could even tell the parents some candy will be in it for their child if they behave (to give the patient something to look forward to).

Just remember: making sure the child isn’t surprised is one of the most important things you can do if you want the appointment to go off without a hitch. These tips will help make sure that goal becomes a reality.