Bad driver eyesight threatening road safety
Millions of British road users are putting themselves and others at risk by ignoring the state of their deteriorating eyesight, a survey has shown.
It is misconceptions about the safety and comfort of contact lenses and glasses that are preventing many from taking simple steps to improve their vision, a psychologist from the University of Warwick reports
A survey of nearly 1000 adults around the UK, who have not had any eyesight correction, showed a 35% failure rate on the standard eyesight test used by opticians.
A third of these failures admitted they were ‘not surprised’ by this outcome and had taken a conscious decision not to have their vision corrected, leaving June McNicholas surprised to find this group included accountants, architects, nurses, dentists and a taxi driver.
Extrapolating from these figures, Dr McNicholas calculates 2.5 million drivers are navigating Britain’s road with poor eyesight.
“We know that half the UK population wear one form of vision correction or other,” she notes, “but if you thought the other half all have good eyesight, you’d be very wrong indeed.”
The cause of this inaction, Dr McNicholas discovered, is poor understanding of modern contact lenses and glasses.
Many of the group (78%) said they did not want contact lenses because they were uncomfortable, or irritating to use (67%). Nearly two thirds thought that contact lenses posed a risk to optical health.
But Dr McNicholas argues that these beliefs are unrealistic: “Recent advances in contact lens manufacture and the development of new hydrogel materials now make it almost impossible to know you’re wearing lenses within a couple of minutes of first putting them in”.
“The hassle of cleaning and storing lenses, and the already-low risk of infection have now been almost eliminated by the development of daily disposables.”
Dr McNicholas also urges drivers to keep an eye on the development of light weight, comfortable spectacles that flatter their wearer, as 73% thought glasses were irritating to wear and 52% believed them to be unflattering.
The survey also discovered that laser eye surgery was deemed similarly unattractive by those neglecting their optical health, with 73% judging this approach too expensive, and 37% too risky.
Just over half simply did not like the idea of surgery on their eyes.
