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Peter S Dwyer

What is the Optometry Council? The Optometry Council is not a prominent institution and not well known, even among optometrists but it is a body of considerable importance to assuring the competence of optometrists in Australia and New Zealand. The Optometry Council does two things. It assesses the schools of optometry in Australia and New Zealand every seven years for accreditation and it provides written and clinical examinations to assess the competence of overseas trained optometrists who wish to be registered to practise in Australia or New Zealand. The Council is an advisory body: it has no statutory powers in the regulation of the practice of optometry. Its task is to advise the Optometrists Registration Boards of Australia and New Zealand whether they can safely recognise the optometric qualifications awarded by Australian and New Zealand universities and to advise whether overseas-qualified optometrists have the knowledge and skills equivalent to optometrists trained locally. Why does this make the Optometry Council important? There are eight state and territory registration boards in Australia and each board has to determine which optometric qualifications it will recognise. Originally, the boards recognised only the local state qualification and a few somewhat arbitrarily chosen overseas qualifications in the United Kingdom and the USA. Until the 1960s, an optometrist trained in one state could not necessarily obtain registration to practise in another state of Australia. The process by which boards decided which qualifications would be accepted for registration was flawed. None of the boards had the resources to assess the optometric courses in other states, let alone those overseas, and there were no agreed criteria for assessment. The local state qualification, if there was one was recognised as a matter of course, without any formal assessment. The boards were grateful that there was a course of training in optometry in their state and they knew those who took leadership in providing these courses to be people of integrity and ability. Qualifications from other states and overseas were recognised on the basis of historical nostalgia, general reputation or the need to attract more optometrists to the state. Prior to the 1960s, the five optometric courses in Australia were at a similar stage of development and the states