OA Calls for Urgent Action as Optometry Students Are Excluded from Support

Optometry Australia is disappointed that the Australian Government’s expansion of the Commonwealth Prac Payment has overlooked optometry students, despite the significant financial hardship many face while completing mandatory clinical placements.

Optometry students undertake extensive unpaid clinical placements essential to registration as health professionals.

Under OCANZ accreditation standards, optometry students must complete substantial supervised clinical training involving direct patient care. For most students, this includes approximately 1,000 to 1,200 hours of clinical placement, often across multiple locations and including time away from home.

During this time, many students are forced to reduce paid work, travel long distances or temporarily relocate, placing significant financial pressure on them at a time when cost-of-living pressures remain high.

In 2025, Optometry Australia shared the experience of UNSW optometry student Jessie Woodward, whose final year involved 36 weeks of unpaid mandatory placements. Alongside the loss of capacity to undertake paid work, she faced interstate travel, regional commuting and approximately $7,000 in required clinical equipment costs. Her experience demonstrated how placement poverty can affect students’ financial security, wellbeing and ability to focus fully on completing their training.

Yesterday’s announcement extends the expansion to ten allied health professions, alongside the existing scheme for teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work. Optometry, a registered health profession with comparable mandatory placement requirements, remains excluded.

The exclusion of optometry is a missed opportunity to support the future eye care workforce by dismantling the unnecessary financial barrier this scheme was designed to remove.

The burden is not experienced equally. Students from rural and regional communities, those who need to relocate, mature-age students, people with caring responsibilities and students from lower-income backgrounds can face particularly significant barriers, which is denying them a fair go.

Further, Optometry Australia is working hard to increase the representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clinicians which is currently the lowest of any Ahpra-registered profession. Placement poverty may be a real barrier to help addressing this workforce inequity.

Without appropriate support, Australia risks limiting entry to the optometry profession to those who can afford to absorb months of unpaid training and associated costs.

Optometry Australia has consistently advocated for optometry students to be included in the Commonwealth Prac Payment. In 2025, we supported the Allied Health Professions Australia (AHPA) campaign for the scheme to be expanded, elevated the experiences of optometry students and enabled student representative Jessie Woodward to attend the campaign launch at Parliament House and speak directly about the impact of unpaid placements. We have continued working with AHPA and supporting crossbench efforts to expand the scheme in line with the recommendations of the Universities Accord.

In February 2026, Optometry Australia also welcomed Parliamentary Budget Office costings commissioned by Dr Helen Haines MP and Senator David Pocock, which estimated that extending the payment to medical and allied health students would cost approximately $290 million over four years. These costings demonstrated that broader inclusion is a practical and achievable investment in Australia’s future health workforce.

While we welcome the Government’s recognition that more students undertaking mandatory placements need financial support, there remains more work to do to ensure all health students are treated equitably. We understand that a consideration of government may have been to exclude professions in oversupply.   While that is an issue that needs to be addressed, we believe it is unfair to disadvantage individual students for that reason.

Optometry Australia has written to the Minister for Education, the Hon. Jason Clare MP, calling for the exclusion of optometry students from the Commonwealth Prac Payment to be remedied. We have requested an urgent meeting to present the evidence, including the significant placement requirements undertaken by optometry students, the inequity created by their continued exclusion and the consequences for the diversity and sustainability of Australia’s future eye health workforce.

Addressing placement poverty is critical to building a sustainable, representative and geographically distributed optometry workforce. Talented students should not be discouraged from entering or completing a profession because they cannot afford the mandatory clinical training required to qualify. Supporting optometry students through placement is an investment not only in their education, but in the future availability of essential eye care for communities across Australia.