Life during lockdown
Lockdown has been a very strange experience! Bet that comment absolutely blew you away!
Closed Door Service
Like everyone else our whole lives have been knocked sideways. At work during lockdown, we have been operating a closed door service. Alan, Andrew and myself manned phone lines to deal with all sorts of issues from broken specs, contact lens orders and advising treatment for patients.
It is a whole new world making diagnoses without actually seeing the patient, and I pray that we got all or at least most right!!! To help though we have used a lot of phone photographs of red eyes, lumps of metal etc. I am absolutely not technologically capable but my oh my, some of you lot couldn’t photograph a barn door. But we all survived.
During lockdown, we couldn’t and still can’t let anyone walk into the practice, the door is still locked. So many repairs were brought to the door and we took them from you. Fortunately, the weather has been reasonable so standing outside has not been such a trial. Whereas, doing the repair always threw up a major problem. Gloved or not we are not supposed to touch our face, nose mouth etc so why is it that as soon as you are holding a frame, handed in by someone who may have the dreaded lurgy, does your nose get itchy!
We have also done dozens of contact lens orders over the last three months. I am happy to say that almost 100% were successful. What you have to understand is that Alan, Andrew and myself have no clue how the mechanics of the practices work. Sure, we can test eyes, fit contacts, diagnose problems but don’t ask us to use the till, take telephone payments, order goods. If anybody had stuff delayed/lost/wrong blame us three. I will now make a bold statement.
Open, but only for Urgent and Essential Eyecare Needs
Since Monday 29 June, the Scottish government have decided that we can now see patients again. So, we are back in practice and are looking a bit different from the last time you saw us. We’re decked out in our PPE, there are screens throughout the practice for your protection and we are following new safety measures, including social distancing, wearing masks and using hand sanitizer to keep everyone safe.
Great I hear you say. Or maybe not so great. We can only see emergency or essential patients. Emergency easy to understand, essential???? Well what does that actually mean? There are a number of categories that come under ‘Essential’ eyecare, too many to be listed here, but please call your local practice with your concerns and we can see how we can help. We can also still help with repairs, replacing broken or lost specs and geting you more contact lenses. All it takes is a phone call…
Finally, I do understand that you may be missing Alan dishing out cheek, but hopefully it won’t be for too much longer and you will see our cheery faces peering at you from behind a mask and a screen sometime soon.
Take care and stay healthy
John ( the dapper gent with the very long grey locks)
This article first appeared on https://hmdopticians.co.uk/life-during-lockdown/