Eye Examination Process

Home vists can be arranged for housebound patients please contact us for more information about home visits.

1. The Consulting Room

The optician will ask about your own and your family's medical history. Several eye conditions are hereditary and many others are related to health, so it is important to take these factors into account.

2. Pre-Examination Checks

Your optical adviser may carry out any preliminary checks that are required, prior to your eye examination. These can include testing your eye pressure (to detect glaucoma - which, if undetected, could lead to blindness), checking sideways field of vision and colour vision.

All these checks are quick and painless, and will provide us with important information that will help monitor any slight changes over time.

3. Retinoscope

Your optician will look at your eyes through a small hand-held instrument that shines a light into your eyes. The light bounces off the back of your eye and by focusing the beam it's possible to get an accurate measurement of your prescription.

4. Your Opinion

These are tests where you say what you see. You look through an instrument at various images projected onto the opposite wall while your optometrist flips different lenses in front of your eyes. These tests determine the best prescription to give you balanced vision.

5. How You Focus

As you get older the lens in your eye becomes less flexible, making it difficult to focus close up, so your optometrist may test your ability to focus at varying distances.

In one such test the optician asks you to focus on a sliding target while it is moved towards you until it becomes blurred.

6. Eye Movement and Focus

To check that your eyes move and focus properly, your optician will move a pen around in front of your eyes and towards your nose. You may also be invited to take a colour blindness test. Because this is normally a stable and hereditary condition, you will only take this test once, at your first visit.

A small torch will also be flashed in your eyes to determine how well your pupils react. This helps reveal any possible neurological problems.

7. Inside Your Eye

Your optician shines a bright light into your eye and examines the health of the back of the eye and to check the clarity of the lens.

During this part of the examination, any early indications of high blood pressure, glaucoma or cataract can be picked up.

8. Glaucoma and Peripheral Vision

Your optician may want to test for glaucoma by testing for loss of vision at the side, in the middle or in patches.

This is done using a visual field screener, which flashes dots of light against a black background and you say how many dots you see and where. If you fail to see some dots, you may have a blind spot.

9. Eye Pressure

A machine blows a puff of air into your eyes to measure their internal pressure. This is an important test that can indicate the early stages of glaucoma.

10. Outside Your Eye

A slit lamp - a powerful, illuminated microscope - is used to check the outside of your eye for abnormalities or scratches.

11. The Prescription

After you have completed all the tests, your optician will give you your prescription and explain the recommendations; if you require spectacles our Dispensing Assistant will help you to choose a style to match your looks and budget.