Statement from our Director of Medical and Education

Recent weeks have seen significant global changes to people’s lives due to the novel coronavirus, Sars-Cov-2. The disease it causes, Covid-19, has had devastating effect and has brought many health care systems almost to a standstill.

Birmingham Optical want to ensure we are doing all we can to support you. We have kept our own ‘emergency service’ running to take your calls, provide equipment
for Optical and Lab as well as service support and we are always there to offer advice. To help fill your time we have increased our online training provision and CET through our highly popular Education Portal.

We have also increased our activity around sourcing and providing PPE and advice around both Covid-19, PPE and our thoughts around what ‘normal’ might look like in practices when lock down is over as it will probably never look like it did before.

We hope that our information in this section helps clarify what PPE you should have on hand and how best to protect both your teams and your customers moving forward. To make this new landscape a little easier we have produced a calculator which will work out the amount of PPE you need bespoke to your practice(es) to ensure you have a complete start up kit of PPE.

Moving forward you can reorder as required, please be aware the lead times are longer than usual and freight costs are high so it would make perfect sense to secure a minimum 4-6 weeks on your first order.

It is inevitable that things will never really go back to how they were before the Sars-CoV-2 virus first began to infect people. Providing clinical services, like optometry, will now require much more robust infection control procedures, including increased distancing wherever possible, mandatory use of PPE and infection control products, possibly issuing patients with PPE if required to interact with them when social distancing rules can’t be respected.

To that end, Birmingham Optical are continuing to find innovative methods of assisting practices and clinicians to continue to offer their staff and patients a safe and effective working environment. For example, we’re working on a range of remote refraction solutions where clinicians can distance themselves from the patient. We have options for remote viewing of clinical data, even from home or at another practice (whilst maintaining security). We’re also sourcing a range of patient supplies, like supplements, eye drops and more that can be sent out to your customers.

If you have any specific needs or need support around decisions for your PPE, practice set up and offering eye care services, please don’t hesitate to contact Birmingham Optical for advice.

Click here to visit our Coronavrius Hygiene page for information and our producs

Jason Higginbotham Bsc (Hons) MCOptom Prof Cert Glau FBDO
Director of Medical and Education