How to choose an optometrist in Lagos

Lagos has a great many places that will sell you a pair of spectacles. Rather fewer of them are qualified to examine your eyes, and the difference is not always obvious from the shopfront.

This is not a matter of professional territory. An eye examination is the main opportunity anyone has to catch glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy or a retinal problem before it costs them their sight. A transaction that produces a pair of lenses and no examination has skipped the part that mattered.

Who is qualified

A Doctor of Optometry holds an OD degree — six years of university training in Nigeria — and is registered with the Optometrists and Dispensing Opticians Registration Board of Nigeria (ODORBN). Optometrists examine eyes, diagnose and manage eye conditions, prescribe spectacles and contact lenses, and refer on where surgery or specialist medical care is needed. They are primary eye care providers: in most cases, the first and often the only practitioner a patient needs to see.

A dispensing optician is trained and registered to fit and supply spectacles to a prescription. They do not examine eyes or issue prescriptions.

An ophthalmologist is a medical doctor with specialist surgical training in the eye, and is registered with the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria. Surgery — cataract, retinal, glaucoma surgery — is theirs.

Anyone else selling you lenses is doing exactly that: selling you lenses.

What to check

Registration. A practising optometrist holds a current ODORBN licence. It is a fair question to ask and there is nothing awkward about asking it. Every practitioner listed in this chapter's register is registered.

That an examination is actually offered. Not a quick look at a chart — an examination that includes the health of the eye, front and back, and the pressure inside it. If nobody proposes to look at the back of your eyes, you are not being examined.

Equipment. At minimum, a slit lamp for the front of the eye, a means of examining the retina, and a way of measuring intraocular pressure. A practice without these cannot do the parts of the examination that find serious disease.

That you get your prescription. It is yours. You are entitled to take it elsewhere to have the spectacles made. A practice reluctant to release it is telling you something about its priorities.

What happens if something is found. A good practitioner has referral relationships and will tell you plainly where they are sending you and why.

Warning signs

• Spectacles sold from a table, a bus, or a market stall with no examination at all.
• Ready-made reading glasses presented as a substitute for an examination. They can be a reasonable stopgap for straightforward presbyopia, but they correct both eyes identically, ignore astigmatism, and examine nothing.
• Pressure to buy coatings and extras before your prescription has even been explained to you.
• Anyone offering to cure a refractive error with drops, exercises or herbal preparations.
• A price for "an eye test" that is conspicuously lower than everyone else's — usually because it is a chart reading attached to a sale.

On cost

A comprehensive examination is not free, and it should not be. It is professional time, on equipment that costs real money, producing a clinical record and a decision. Set against what it can catch, it is inexpensive.

If cost is a genuine barrier, the chapter runs free screening at outreach events through the year — around World Sight Day in October and World Glaucoma Week in March in particular. These are announced on this site's events page.

Finding someone

The chapter maintains a searchable register of licensed Doctors of Optometry practising in Lagos State, organised by area. Every entry is a registered practitioner. You can search it by name, by practice, or by the part of Lagos you live or work in.