Issues and News from your Association
It's Your Association: Tell Us What You Need

By Mary Field

The Opticians Association of Canada (OAC) has devoted much of its time this past twelve months to reviewing structures and goals and evaluating services to members. We provide two basic kinds of services to you, our members: assisting and sustaining services, and leadership.

Assisting and sustaining services help you on day-to-day basis, and cover things like insurance, continuing education and counseling. When you call with a question or a request someone is there to respond, to sympathize and to guide.
These services are usually developed in response to member requests.

The OAC believes it does a pretty good job of responding to our members. Continuing education is a good example of this. Opticians asked for choice, economy of cost, ease of access and quality of content. In response, over the past year the OAC has expanded its continuing education library to well over 130 distance delivery modules. We’ve weeded out some of the material that is out-of-date and included more themes that are eyeglass-related. We have advocated consideration for self-directed study to the quality assurance committees of regulatory bodies. The study group concept allows opticians in isolated areas to choose their own topics, develop their own study plans and have a more enriching experience.

Assisting and sustaining services are only going to be relevant to our members, if you tell us what you want and need. If you have topics of interest you’d like to see researched, let us know.  If you’ve heard a speaker you think would be significant and engaging, let us know. Your part of the equation is to speak up. Our part of the equation is to roll up our sleeves and see what we can do for you.

It may not be as easy for you to see and appreciate the leadership role the OAC plays. Leadership involves anticipating the needs of the profession into the future and includes networking, gathering information, analyzing trends and building credibility with the larger community of professionals. You see no immediate return from those efforts. Sometimes it takes years to move forward even a tiny bit.

For example, in 2000 the OAC started getting phone calls from opticians who told us that plano coloured contact lenses were being sold in drugstores, jewelry stores and even in tattoo parlours. The OAC was not alone in receiving those calls.  Many of the regulatory agencies were also alerted to what was apparently the illegal dispensing of contact lenses. The OAC started to look into the matter only to discover that the primary marketer of these lenses had received a re-classification of product from Health Canada moving them into a ‘cosmetic’ as opposed to a ‘medical devices’ category. The intervening years have seen countless meetings with Health Canada, trips to Ottawa, collaboration with the other two ‘O’s and only now – eight years later – can we say that some progress has been made. (For further information on this issue visit or log on the OAC website at www.opticians.ca.) But just because it takes a long time and just because there is no immediate payback to efforts doesn’t mean we stop working toward a responsible resolution.

The Opticians Association of Canada believes we are at a time when strong national leadership is fundamental to moving our profession forward. We cannot afford to be complacent and believe the current model of dispensing will survive. The business or retail part of dispensing will shift with competitive selling models – that is clear. Someone will always find a new way to appeal to consumers.

But what form will new models take? The optician as a vision care professional will endure only if opticians can see the changes that need to be made and work together toward making those changes. Why do we need to change? The following are some of the reasons.

Governments are altering their approach to professional regulation. There is a groundswell of belief that the public is best served by economy of regulation. There is growing talk about collaborative practice amongst professionals with overlapping scopes of practice. What would collaborative practice look like? It could be good for opticians, but will they participate in developing the model? Will they be equal partners with the other ’O’s? Is it even possible to have a collaborative relationship between vision care professionals?

Opticians are angry about the Internet sale of contact lenses and eyeglasses. The College of Opticians of British Columbia has taken action against a B.C. based Internet vendor. Is it possible to stop the erosion of business to the Internet? If it isn’t, what steps we can take to balance that loss?

Even after half a century of regulation of Opticians in Canada, the public still doesn’t understand the important role opticians play in their vision care. People are still driven to purchase based on price and ease of access rather than on quality of service and advice. Lack of understanding and appreciation of the necessity for interface with an optician has allowed people to undervalue our profession. Collectively we need to change that.

Canadian opticians are well represented on the national stage by the OAC, the National Association of Canadian Optician Regulators (NACOR) and the Opticians Council of Canada (OCC). But the best efforts of any leader or leadership group will only bear fruit if supported by a strong, participating membership. A vibrant profession needs feet on the ground. If Canadian opticians are to move above the radar into the public consciousness we need a full court press by opticians in every province, city, town, village and hamlet. The OAC can develop models you can use to reach out to the community but you have to do the reaching.

Stay connected. Keep in touch with us. Let us know what you need and what you hear. Commit time and energy to your provincial and national associations. Together we are strong. Winston Churchill once said, “Change is the price of survival.” Collective change requires preparation, vision and participation.