Welcome to the GOC Consultation Hub

Our COVID-19 statements consultation sought views on how we could continue to support our registrants and the optical sector throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as different parts of the UK experienced local and potentially national restrictions now and in the future.

In particular, we asked for views on:

• a proposed framework for when our existing COVID-19 statements should apply going forwards, linked to The College of Optometrists’ red/amber/green classification system;
• the content and impact of our existing COVID-19 statements; and
• whether there were further areas of GOC regulations, legislation or guidance that needed to change or be put in place to ensure more effective regulation in the future, either during a pandemic or as a result of the pandemic.

Our consultation closed in January 2021 and we received 72 responses.

We commissioned Enventure Research to analyse the responses and the report is available to view on our website. 

We published our response to the consultation on our website on 28 May 2021.

We decided to align all of our statements to The College of Optometrists’ red/amber/green classification system.

We reviewed all of our statements on the basis of feedback from the consultation and updated each of them, clearly indicating the phase of the pandemic in which they apply.

Our response and the updated COVID-19 statements are available on our COVID-19 latest information webpage.

We asked stakeholders for their views on our new draft strategic plan. 

Thank you for all your feedback. We have considered all the comments we recieved and this has helped us to finalise the plan. 

On 1 April 2020 our new strategic plan came into force.

Our ‘Fit for the future’ strategy for 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2025 describes what we plan to do over the next five years to achieve our vision of being recognised for delivering world-class regulation and excellent customer service.

2020 has proven to be an unprecedented time for the optical professions and we did not anticipate that our strategic plan would be published during such extraordinary circumstances.

COVID-19 has impacted the way we currently regulate and will no doubt impact the future of the optical professions and in turn, our strategic plan. Therefore, as we continue to monitor the situation, we will revisit this plan after one year.

The three main strategic objectives for the next five years are:

• Delivering world-class regulatory practice
• Transforming customer service
• Building a culture of continuous improvement

We asked the Open Canvas audience to provide feedback on the first task as conducted by the Expert Advisory Group (EAG). 

The general feedback was that Knowledge, Skills and Behaviour applied to all categories, the EAG also agreed with this.

Under the following categories and elements, the Open Canvas feedback suggested:

• Communication category: Under Communication the elements ‘Attitude' and 'Demeanour’ should read as ‘Professional Conduct’. ‘Breaking Bad News’ and ‘Managing Patient Expectations’ should read as ‘Explaining and Advising’
• Supporting Others to Develop category: Under this category it was felt by a respondent that the element ‘Teaching’ should read as ‘Teaching and Assessing’
• ‘Lifelong Learning’ category could incorporate ‘Supporting Others to Develop’
• Clinical Excellence category should be merged with Clinical Management category
• A respondent disagreed with the element ‘Entrepreneurship' sitting under Clinical Excellence and felt the name of this element was unsuitable
• Disagreement with the element ‘Multimodal’ which sits under the Communication category.

We presented the feedback from Open Canvas for Task 1 to the EAG they then decided whether to accept, reject or incorporate the feedback from Open Canvas into the next stage. The EAG feedback can be seen below:

• Communication category - Under Communication the group decided that:
  • ‘Professional Conduct’ is a more suitable term than ‘Attitude and Demeanour’.
  • ‘Breaking bad news’ and ‘Managing patient expectations’ should fall under an element called ‘Advising the patient’.
• Supporting Others to Develop category: Under this category the group decided that the element ‘Teaching’ should be ‘Teaching and Contribution to Assessing’
• The EAG felt that the Lifelong Learning category should be kept as is and should not be merged with Supporting Others to Develop
• The EAG felt that the ‘Clinical Excellence’ category and the ‘Clinical Management’ category should not be merged.
• The element ‘Entrepreneurship’ (under Clinical Excellence) should read as ‘Innovation’ instead and the EAG decided against the use of ‘Multimodal’ as an element under the Communication category.  

We continue to invite you to relay to your stakeholders that the ESR Open Canvas is a platform open to the thoughts of all interested parties as we continue to develop the ESR.