First of all, I hope you and your families are staying safe and in good health.

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For all optical practices the past week has been unprecedented and we are expecting that as this virus evolves and as the NHS and the government’s plans intensify, there will be further disruption on a scale that we’ve never seen before across all practices in the UK and Ireland.

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In turn what that means is that the teams in all these practices including those members of the team who are not employed, our locums or self-employed, they will also have disruption to their normal employment and monthly income.

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For employed workers, the chancellor Rishi Sunak announced measures which would allow employers to still effectively keep their employee’s but put them on a period of furlough, which would allow them to avoid redundancies whilst we have a downturn in trading.

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It fell short of reassuring the self employed locums of what measures they will be putting in place to help Britain’s self-employed professionals who are facing coronavirus ruin.  It’s expected that a multibillion pound rescue package will be forthcoming for the self-employed workers and therefore specifically locum optometrists and the DO’s.  That gives some hope to all the Optom’s and DO’s who locum across our practices. Once we’ve got the information we’ll be communicating it out there.
 

Stay safe. 

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Aadil Ahmad

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