37-20 61st Str, Woodside, NY 11377
The people here
five people, and what each one actually does.
Optometrist, and the partner who runs the practice
Nadia opened the practice on 61st Street and still spends four days a week in a lane rather than in the office, which is the arrangement she says she would not give up. Most of the children seen here are seen by her, and the myopia programme is hers: she started keeping eye-length measurements on children years before it was ordinary, which is why some of the records here go back far enough to be worth something.
Optometrist
David does most of the monitoring work here — the people who come back every six months to have the same three measurements taken and laid beside last time's. It is the least dramatic clinic in the building and the one where finding something early actually changes what happens to somebody. He also runs the dry eye assessments, on the grounds that nobody else wanted to.
Optometrist
Marisol takes most of the same-day eyes, which means her diary is deliberately half empty at nine in the morning and rarely half empty by noon. She also runs the low vision assessments, where an hour is spent on the four or five things somebody has stopped doing rather than on a chart, and where the answer is more often a lamp than a device.
Dispensing optician
Tom runs the frame room and the bench behind it. He measures every frame that leaves the building and re-measures most of them a fortnight later, because a frame settles and a settled frame has usually moved the lens away from where it was set. He is also the person who will tell you that the frame you have fallen in love with cannot take the lens you need, which is not a sales technique.
Practice manager
Eileen answers the telephone, keeps the diary honest, and does the work of finding out what a plan says before somebody arrives rather than after. She has been in optical practice for long enough to know which questions get a useful answer out of an insurer and which ones get a form, and she will tell you plainly when the answer is that she cannot find out.
A real optometry practice puts its optometrists' state licence numbers on this page, and you can check every one of them against the public register before you make an appointment. There are none here, because there is nobody to license: the five people above are invented, this site is a demonstration of what a practice's website can look like, and the numbers would be the first thing a visitor should be able to verify. If you are looking at this as a template for your own practice, this is where yours go.
The booking form lets you choose who you would like to see, or leave it to whoever is free.