Optometry Australia is committed to ensuring a well-supported, sustainable workforce that meets the eye health needs of all Australians. Our focus is to address key workplace challenges affecting our members, including workforce demand, supply, planning and improving workplace conditions in optometry.
A strong, secure and sustainable optometry workforce is essential to:
Our newly released Optometry Workforce Projection Study, developed by the Centre for the Business and Economics of Health (CBEH), The University of Queensland (UQ), forecasts the optimal supply of registered optometrists in the Australian workforce from 2025 to 2040. It provides key insights to support effective workforce planning and to ensure a robust workforce into the future.
Key findings suggest:
The report highlights a significant disparity between the current level of optometry service utilisation and the true population need for optometric care. Optometry Australia believes we have a responsibility to the profession and to the community to work swiftly and strategically to ensure closer alignment between demand for services and population eye care needs. Promoting the full scope of our profession’s skillset and ensuring everyone with eye care needs accesses services is essential to closing this gap – this is how we ensure a robust, sustainable profession.
While it’s the right thing to focus on increasing service access to match population need, seeking to increase workforce supply before an increase in actual service utilisation would be to the detriment of the profession, and the community. Optometry Australia will continue to oppose approaches that would increase workforce supply in the short term, including new optometry programs.
Despite workforce oversupply at a national level, significant geographic maldistribution persists at the expense of regional, rural and remote communities. This is not a simple issue of workforce size. It demands multi-pronged responses that overcome barriers, and incentivise, working rurally and with populations that have reduced access to care.
Optometry Australia has initiated a program of work and are committed to facilitating informed conversation on this issue across the profession and more broadly to to support better workforce distribution.
As a sector, we have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to ensure we proactively plan for a robust future workforce that is an appropriate size, well-supported and positioned to meet community needs. This study is an important tool to support well-considered workforce planning.
We are also focused on ensuring the optometry workforce is equipped to embrace future opportunities to meet the eye health needs of all Australians. Through our Optometry 2040 project, we have identified factors necessary to support the evolution of the workforce, and are embedding approaches to realise these.
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In the spirit of reconciliation Optometry Australia acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
