Blog
Rawlings Croydon Wins National Award
Posted: Tuesday 2nd April 2019
We are delighted that our Croydon branch has now been nationally recognised with a 2019 Optician Award for Enhanced Services announced on Saturday at an evening ceremony held in Birmingham.
All Rawlings Opticians branches offer services above and beyond eye examinations for glasses and contact lenses. We also offer appointments for Dry & Watery Eyes, Glaucoma Referral Refinement, Coloured Overlays, Blephex Lid Cleaning Treatment and for Minor Eye Conditions. In parts of the country some of these services are funded by the NHS and this is dependent on the local authority in that area. Many of these appointments allow patients easy access on the High Street without clogging up Eye Casualty and keeping patients from having to go to their G.P. saving the NHS valuable resources. Rawlings Croydon examined 1200 patients in 2018 for specialist services on top of the usual clinics of eye examinations and contact lens appointments. Of these 1200 only 8% required onward referral meaning around 1100 patients were given treatment or advice and kept out of hospital and GP clinics.
All of these additional services require investment in equipment and staff training, and Rawlings Croydon has been a trailblazer having been accredited from the start and immediately seeing a high number of patients as soon as their local health authority launched the scheme. Our continuing development in equipment and staff knowledge lets us align with the same standard of care that the patient would obtain in hospital for these services.
As well as the services above, we are also developing a trial of telemedicine ophthalmology with Dawn Sim, a local ophthalmologist at Moorfields Croydon. We are using a cloud based platform that allows patients to be seen and reviewed in the practice and if required an OCT scan review by a doctor. Patients who would previously need to be monitored by the hospital can now either be discharged at the first visit or be monitored in the same practice at a future date. This obviously has financial benefits for the NHS and the patients can be seen in a more convenient location.
As the NHS continually needs to save money we expect more local schemes to be set up in other areas so that patients at all our branches can have NHS funded appointments for more eye conditions. The overall aim is to allow secondary care and primary care to work together in a much more joined up way to allow patients to be seen in the appropriate setting in a cost effective way.
It is our aim to make sure that we can provide the best service we can in all Rawlings branches and are constantly striving to develop the practices to achieve this.
All of us at Rawlings would like to congratulate the Optometrists at Croydon (David Barker, Simon Callaghan, Anhar Hassan & Fardip Rashid) and the manager Reena Patel as well as the support staff Samantha Jones, Samantha Smith, Decio Miguel, Sheena Shah and Dianne Gillam - keep up the good work!
< Back
