Just starting or running a business and need some answers from experts? Join us on the OSA stand at five stations to meet with experts that can help you.

Station 1: Phil Mullens, MD NEG/Optinet – Streamline your business, to create more patient time, increased footfall and better returns. Phil will show the power of a buying group, with insight on how good record keeping and understanding data can propel your practice forward.

Station 2: Chris Clements, Eyeplan Ltd – Explaining how eye plan can improve business with returning patients. Chris will explain the advantages of using eye plans and their simple marketing and practice building potential.

Station 3: Georgina Myers, Myers La Roche – Advice on new starts, new premises or expansion and succession plans. Georgina, following on from Patrick her father, has a wealth of knowledge and examples to share with practice owners to assist with change.

Station 4:  Samantha Shayler, Snowbird Finance – Financing your business acquisitions, developing your business and softening tax payments plus assisting your patients with treatment finance. Samantha is a specialist credit broker to the optical industry with her knowledge built up over years of working with the profession.

Station 5: Bob Hutchinson, Eros Business Consulting – Budgets and sales forecasts, looking at stock control in a more productive and profitable way and of course de minimis and partial exemption. Bob is well known both to practice owners and industry for providing easily adoptable solutions and his knowledge on VAT remains long past his success in chairing the meetings with HMRC which eventually secured the return of over 650 million pounds to Opticians.

You will have up to 10 minutes on each station before moving on to the other stations.

Photobiomodulation is ‘the mechanism by which nonionising optical radiation in the visible and near-infrared spectral range is absorbed by endogenous chromophores to elicit photophysical and photochemical events at various biological scales without eliciting thermal damage’. Come and find out how it differs from intense pulsed light therapy and how you can use it in clinical practice to treat dry eye patients.

This session will outline the current situation with progressive myopia and an innovative solution provided by a recently launched contact lens material. The generic-based presentation will explore the management of myopia and the evaluation of tyrosine and dopamine levels in the tear film prior to, and after wearing, a tyrosine-releasing contact lens and its effect on myopia control.

For all patient groups being able to see clearly from an effective dispense is extremely important in daily life; however, for paediatric patients it is potentially life-changing as a successful intervention or correction can impact on their long-term vision, educational achievement, career opportunities and social development. The majority of paediatric frames are produced as a smaller version of an adult design and while they may hold cosmetic appeal with the use of designer brands and popular characters, the resultant fit is often far from satisfactory in terms of holding the lens in a stable and appropriate position as well as lacking the ability to physically adjust the frame to fit a child’s face. This session will explore facial development and the various facial parameters that should be considered when designing spectacle frames for children based on a recent anthropometrical study.

This session highlights several newer diagnostic modalities for evaluating patients with glaucoma. The diagnosis of glaucoma and the management of glaucoma are highly influenced by technological advances. Determining stability in the glaucoma patient is critical to the patient’s overall wellbeing and this lecture examines some of the newer tools in facilitating proper management.

If you are feeling the pressure to act more ‘sustainably’, but are struggling to know where to start, don’t miss this. It’s easy to feel that taking action on climate change is a monumental, expensive challenge. Easy to believe that ‘it’s all about plastic’ and miss doing anything about your carbon footprint. This presentation will share a concise system for caring for your bit of the planet. You’ll get the essentials of carbon accounting and footprint analysis, and an introduction to a sustainability pathway designed specifically for optics.

This talk is to introduce the future of eye care as personalised, predictive and protective. A new dimension of eye care is on the horizon – the ability for patients to self-monitor their vision at home, and how we can harness that data as clinicians, to add value to our patients’ experiences and to our practices.

Ophthalmology is among the most technology-driven of the all the medical specialties, with treatments utilising high-spec medical lasers and advanced microsurgical techniques, and diagnostics involving ultra-high resolution imaging. Ophthalmology is also at the forefront of many trailblazing research areas in healthcare, such as stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and – most recently – artificial intelligence. In July 2016, Moorfields announced a formal collaboration with the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, DeepMind. This collaboration involves the sharing of >1,000,000 anonymised retinal scans with DeepMind to allow for the automated diagnosis of diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy (DR). In this presentation, Professor Pearse Keane will describe the motivation – and urgent need – to apply deep learning to ophthalmology, the processes required to establish a research collaboration between the NHS and a company like DeepMind, the initial results of his research, and finally, why he believes that ophthalmology could be first branch of medicine to be fundamentally reinvented through the application of artificial intelligence.

This session will provide an overview of the International Opticians Association outlining memberships stats, who is eligible to join and accomplishments. A taster of the upcoming summit in Singapore in April 2023 will also be given.

This lecture will reflect on the concept of how to gather the most appropriate patient data in order to provide enhanced clinics in primary care practice, in particular reference to specialist dry eye and myopia management clinics. It will review the latest devices available and discuss how to interpret the data in a meaningful and practical way. It will also review how to use data to engage in good patient education and compliance with proposed treatment options.

A workshop style presentation that will explore environmentally-friendly frame materials. Following an introduction to ‘the green movement’ and sustainable terminology the attendees will discuss and review environmentally-friendly frame materials with their peers. The workshop will explore re-used materials, sustainable materials and packaging as well as their advantages/disadvantages, adjustability, glazeability, patient suitability, durability and identification of suitable/interested patients. The workshop will allow attendees to familiarise themselves with a variety of different environmentally-friendly frame materials ‘side-by-side’ and learn how to differentiate between them.

UKCA mark or CE mark? What is the difference and why does it matter? Do you need to be registered with the MHRA? What happens if you buy your frames directly from a manufacturer outside the UK? This session will provide an introduction to the current state of play on medical device regulation in the UK and Europe, explaining what has changed and what further changes are to come, outlining what this means for manufacturers and also for the owners and managers of optical practices.

This presentation will concentrate on OCT-angiography (OCT-A) and how it is quickly becoming key in the diagnosis and management of glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration and many other eye diseases. There will be a run through of the features of OCT-A and its benefits in optometric practice along with a number of case studies displaying the enhanced features discussed in the presentation.