Australian Optometry Workforce: how many is enough?

Is the Australian Optometry Workforce large enough to provide for the eye care needs of it citizens?

Apparently not.

The Department of Immigration has placed Optometry on a list of in demand occupations.
Australia currently has a skill shortage across all sorts of sectors, most notably the resources sector. The mining boom in Western Australia and Queensland has lead to an extreme shortage of skilled and unskilled workers. This is evidenced by the massive inflation of wages for those who work in that sector. This doesn’t just apply to engineers and tradesmen: unskilled workers whose only qualification is a four limbs and a pulse can command AUD$150,000 PA.

Against this backdrop of skills shortages, record levels of low unemployment, and retiring baby boomer is it any wonder that Optometry firms are having difficulty recruiting Optometrists? These are the very firms that have made submissions to Department of Immigration to have Optometry placed on a list of in demand occupations.

But is there really a shortage of Optometrists?

There are certainly no shortage of Optometry businesses. It seems like even the smallest shopping centre has 2 or 3. Larger shopping districts such as Chatswood in Sydney have about 40 practices in a few miles radius of each other.

If there were truly a shortage of Optometrists then patients would have to wait weeks or months to get an appointment. However the average waiting time to get an appointment is about 1 hour.

If we move from the anecdotal to published research then we find that the most recent study, The Australian Optometric Workforce 2005 ( Horton et al) concluded that there was sufficient Optometrist to meet the eye care needs of Australia.

In the study Horton et al (2005) move past the raw numbers to come up with a more refined concept called an Equivalent Full Time Optometrist (EFTO). This takes into account that of the 2700 registered optometrists not all of them work full time. They concluded that an equivalent full time optometrist conducts about 8 examination per day or 1825 per year. They also state that a typical examination takes 45 mins, so that an optometrist would spend 6 hours per day consulting with clients.

So clearly there is spare capacity. But even this spare capacity is understated.

In the Horton et al study there is a fundamental incorrect assumption. They state that typical examination takes 45 mins. They have overestimated the consultation time by a 50%. The average consultation in fact takes just 30 mins, so that the average optometrist spends just 4 hour per day performing consultations.

What does this mean? It means that there are enough Optometrists in Australia to service a population of 40 million, which is double the current Australian population. It also means that half the optometrists in Australia could be run over a by a bus tomorrow and the population would still have no problem obtaining an eye test.

The so called shortage of optometrists is simply an over abundance of optical businesses. Each of those businesses needs an optometrist in order to operate effectively. If you were to look inside the average business you would find an under employed optometrist yawning and twiddling their thumbs waiting for a patient to arrive.