Letters | Why Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority should accept optometrist referrals
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Optometrists are currently unable to make direct referrals to the Hospital Authority. Allowing optometrists to do so could improve the delivery of eye care.
The Hospital Authority only accepts referrals from medical practitioners for eye conditions. However, doctors’ referrals are less accurate than optometrists’ referrals.
Recent data from Canadian paediatric ophthalmology services shows that diagnostic accuracy rates are lower among family physicians and paediatricians, and substantially higher among optometrists; at the same time, fewer of these referrals are made by optometrists.
Enabling optometrists to make referrals would reduce the volume of both referrals and false positives to secondary or tertiary ophthalmology services. Most importantly, patients will receive more timely care due to improved detection, and waiting times for patients will no doubt be shorter.
Specifically in the context of Hong Kong, multiple optometrist service experiments were conducted more than a decade ago.
