Outgoing SeeAbility chair Gordon Ilett reflects on his part in improving eye care for people with learning disabilities.

At the start of National Eye Health Week (18th -24th September) we wanted to invite Gordon Ilett to write a blog reflecting on his work. Why? Because Gordon – an optometrist throughout his 35 year career - has been instrumental in championing better eye care for people with learning disabilities and steering our eye care work as a charity since he became a trustee over 15 years ago.

Read the full blog.

We can’t thank Gordon enough for what he has done, and celebrate what he has achieved, but here he is to tell you more:
 
Gordon says:
 
“When SeeAbility asked me to reflect on my eye care career for National Eye Health Week, it was having spent a week steering my trusty Morris Minor ‘Moggie’ around the country fundraising for this wonderful charity. And there were a few setbacks on the way that mirrored some of the experiences of moving eye care forward for people with learning disabilities!
 
So putting pen to paper it seemed very pertinent to write a piece called the  ‘the long and winding road’.

 
I hope you enjoy reading this if not for a small piece of optical nostalgia but also to show how many inspirational people you come across in life and the chance encounters that lead to opportunities you might not have thought possible.  For the main part though, I hope it shows that you should never give up in what you know is the right thing to do, in this case supporting and working alongside people with learning disabilities who have the absolute right to good eye care.
 
When I started as a rookie optometrist, back in the 1980s things had only just started to change for people with learning disabilities in terms of the closure of institutions and this had started to reveal just how shockingly neglected people’s eye care (and wider healthcare) had been.
 
One my most striking experiences was seeing a new patient with a learning disability, a young man, who was in his wheelchair in his special college. The young man was hunched forward in his chair, as if he had curvature of the spine, apparently unable to look up and speak. He’d never had his eyes checked before. I found him to be highly shortsighted and found a pair of glasses to try. To my amazement and that of his physio, who had working with him for years on his poor posture, he suddenly straightened in his wheelchair and looked around in wonder. He was seeing properly for the first time in years. I’m not embarrassed to say that this moved me and the physio to tears and it has been this and countless other experiences like that that makes everything worthwhile.

If only the sight testing system would be as quick to fix as those experiences! But we’re getting there now, after a decade of work, and on the cusp of changing things for the younger generation and getting eye care into special schools in England.

The saying ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has’ might have been pertinent 35 years ago but I think today we are in a much better place. And actually it is citizens with learning disabilities who are changing the world, and one of the things I’m proudest of is to have been their ally in eye care along the way.
 
I hope you enjoy my reflections of this long and winding road.”
 
Read Gordon’s full blog.