Will today's undergraduate optometrists provide tomorrow's low vision services?

Undergraduate optometrists represent a substantial potential future workforce to provide low vision (LV) services.

This study aimed to gain a detailed understanding of the intentions of current undergraduate optometrists to provide LV services.

Academics from 14 universities in the UK were invited to circulate an online survey to their final year undergraduate optometry students. Undergraduate optometrists rated their capabilities, opportunities and motivations to participate in LV services; their confidence in different areas of core optometric practice and in undertaking various clinical tasks; and their likelihood of undertaking postgraduate professional qualifications in different clinical areas. They described their experiences seeing patients for LV assessments and how those experiences impacted their intentions to provide LV assessments in primary care practice.

The survey received responses from undergraduate optometrists from 12 universities (n = 163, 17.3%). Undergraduate optometrists have lower confidence in LV than in other areas of core optometric practice (p < 0.001) and they have lower confidence in tasks involved in LV service delivery than in tasks involved in routine optometric practice (p < 0.001). Undergraduate optometrists are significantly less likely to plan to undertake a postgraduate professional qualification in LV than in other subject areas (p ≤ 0.02 for all subjects) and they perceive the available opportunities to provide LV services in primary care optometry practice to be relatively low (p < 0.001). Undergraduate experiences seeing patients with a vision impairment for LV assessments largely positively impact intentions to provide LV services.

There is scope to increase the confidence of undergraduate optometrists in LV before they enter the professional workforce and increasing undergraduate clinical experiences with LV patients will arguably yield important benefits. However, concurrent interventions aimed at increasing LV service provision in primary care practices appear necessary to improve student perceptions of their future opportunities to provide LV services.