KEY POINTS:
Name: Evan Brown (45)
Job title: Behavioural optometrist
Working hours: 8am to 8pm
Employer: Howes and Brown Optometrists
Pay: $80-$120K
Qualifications needed: Bachelor of Optometry, Certificate in Behavioural Optometry.
Career prospects: A job that stays interesting.
Most behavioural optometrists keep working past retirement age.
What do you do?
We try to help people develop their maximum visual potential. A behavioural optometrist examines the vision system in depth rather than just looking at eyesight.
We look at how people use their vision for perception, memory, recall, visualisation and eye-hand coordination.
Who do you work with?
In our practice we work mainly with children, although we do work with people who have acquired brain injury, such as stroke or traumatic brain injury. And sometimes we work with disabled adults.
We use lenses and prisms, if we can, in terms of spectacles and contact lenses, and then we use exercise therapy to help them develop their abilities.
Most of the children who have learning-related vision difficulties haven't developed skills such as tracking, eye movement control, visualisation and using their visual memory for recall, so we help them to develop those abilities.
Usually, a vision training programme would be between six and nine months.
People are referred by educational psychologists, occupation therapist and teachers. And we have a lot of word-by-mouth referral, and some are referred by other optometrists.
Why did you choose this work?
I was interested in paediatrics optometry. When I left university I became interested in the exercise part of developing visual abilities too, and it became a natural thing to put the two together.
I've also been very interested in how vision is involved in thinking, memory, intelligence and decision-making, so it all shapes itself nicely.
What training do you need?
To become a behavioural optometrist, you finish your optometry degree and then you would probably do a certificate in behavioural optometry at the University of New South Wales in Australia or you might go to America to do a postgraduate education there.
Why is the job important?
Quite a few good studies show that our prisons are full of people with vision problems.
Thats why I like to work with kids who have learning-related vision difficulties.
If we can help kids learn to read using their vision system then they will sit exams and get better jobs and have a better life.
Thats what I enjoy about it the most, seeing kids turn round and come back with good grades, who were previously failing and getting poor self-esteem.
Only about 10 per cent of my job is working with rehabilitative optometry but when you do get a younger patient who has a traumatic brain injury or a CVA (cerebral vascular accident or stroke) and you can help them rebuild their vision system and make it go back to work, it is also enjoyable.
But many of the patients who come in with strokes are elderly and they are not interested in rebuilding so it depends upon the patients.
When there is broken hardware it is always hard to keep people motivated and stepping forward.
Working with children, often the hardwares not broken, they just haven't learnt how to use it.
Then it's more a developmental programme that you are looking at and it's a lot of fun because they get better.
What are the essential qualities of a good behavioural optometrist?
You need good empathy and to be patient.
You need to be creative, you have to try to create the circumstances that help people to become aware of their dysfunctions or disabilities.
Advice to someone wanting to enter this field?
I think its a cool vision field. I think the problem most people have with optometry is that it gets a bit dull, doing the same thing every day. Behavioural optometry keeps you interested right through your career. The brain is a complex organ. It's cool to have a job where you never quite know exactly the right way to do things and you are always trying to do the best you can.
Any interesting tales?
When you are working with a patient, you sort of delve inside how they use their brains - whether they use the visual system or the kinesthetic system or the auditory system the most.
Its interesting to see how different people think and process and work.
We have our success stories, but really it's not us that do that, it's the patients. We guide them in an activity programme and they fix themselves.
