Too many people in rural WA have to wait for eye care treatment. That needs to change | Opinion

When it comes to your health, no one wants to wait any longer than necessary for care, especially for something as vital as your eyesight.

Unfortunately, many Washingtonians, especially those in rural parts of the state, are forced to delay eye care treatment because the only available specialist is not only miles away, but also unavailable any time soon.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Many of these delays could be resolved by allowing optometrists to perform additional procedures that reflect their education and training.. As it stands today, Washington’s laws governing the practice of optometry haven’t been updated in two decades. This is making eye care more expensive and more complicated.

In fact, the last time these laws were updated was in 2003 – before the iPhone was introduced. In the time since then, optometric care procedures, technologies, medications, and education have improved how we can serve our patients. Yet our laws governing optometrists have failed to keep up. That’s why we’re asking legislators to update our scope of practice laws this session in Olympia. Substitute Senate Bill 5389 received a unanimous 10-0 vote in the Senate Health & Long Term Care Committee and awaits a vote of the Senate.

Patients in Washington, especially here in the eastern half of the state, would directly benefit from these scope changes. Updated laws would allow me and my fellow optometrists to apply the training and knowledge we’ve acquired through years of schooling, rather than forcing patients to wait sometimes months, take more time away from work, incur additional travel expense, and pay another insurance co-pay to a specialist for something I am trained to treat — but prohibited by Washington law to perform.

What kind of procedures are we talking about?

Say you have a small bump on your eyelid, and the optometrist you’ve seen for the last decade performs an exam and determines it’s benign and should be removed. The procedure itself is routine — but Washington law won’t let your optometrist perform the procedure, even though they’re trained to do so.

Ironically, if you were in Oregon or Idaho, it could be taken care of in your optometrist’s office. Not so in Washington. In fact, many of my peers have dual licensure in these states, and often just refer their patients to their offices in neighboring states. Obviously, their level of skill doesn’t change just because they cross the border. It’s just that those states recognize our training; Washington does not.

That’s why Washington’s optometrists have proposed a series of common-sense updates to our state’s scope of practice laws. These changes would allow us to perform a range of in-office procedures, deliver injections around the eye, and prescribe certain oral medications. We’ve trained for this, and continue to attend professional education courses to ensure our knowledge and skills remain current.

Optometrists are well-trained medical professionals who serve as primary eyecare providers for almost everyone. In fact, we are often the one doctor patients see on a routine basis, particularly in rural communities, or communities of color. Because there are about three times as many licensed and practicing optometrists in Washington as there are ophthalmologists, allowing us to use our expertise to perform these services would improve access to timely, professional and cost-effective care.

As an optometrist, I want the very best for my patients. I recognize there are conditions that I am not qualified to treat, and our proposal includes a list of more complex procedures and treatments that I would gladly continue to refer to my colleagues to perform. We are not asking to do anything beyond what our training has taught us.

We are, however, asking to deliver safe, quality care to our patients that aligns with our professional training and education – something the state Department of Health believes is safe and reasonable.

The sad reality is we update our smartphones more frequently than we do eyecare laws in Washington state. It’s time for lawmakers to modernizes optometry’s scope of practice laws, to keep up with the best practices of our profession and provide the same safe health care options to patients in every community that patients in other states enjoy.

Virginia Bice, OD, is an optometrist practicing in Kennewick.