The Asia Optometric Congress (AOC) is an organization that works to improve optometric and contact lens practice throughout Asia. I recently had the pleasure to speak with Murphy Chan, president of the AOC.

MURPHY CHAN HIAN KEEPRESIDENT, ASIA OPTOMETRIC CONGRESS

Mr. Chan, please tell us about your organization in terms of its history and direction.

The AOC is a nonprofit professional organization that is duly registered as an organization with the Registry of Societies in Singapore. Its main purpose is to promote the optometry profession in Asia. Unlike other parts of the world, eye care in Asia is heterogenous—the level of primary care goes from basic refraction only to high specialty eyecare deliveries in various states. The AOC provides an opportunity to come together to narrow this gap.

The AOC started in 2007 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is where the first four of our biennial conferences were held. In 2014, we expanded the conference to Singapore. After that, we began a movement to make the AOC more inclusive to other Asian countries and toward different levels of eyecare practice. We have members from 12 countries on our council, each representing recognized professional bodies from each country.

The AOC allows eyecare practitioners, clinicians, academicians, researchers, and industry to showcase their services and their works to support each other. It aims to upgrade the level of optometry in Asia, and its main existence derives from the concept of Asians helping Asia.

Tell us about any new developments in which the AOC is involved.

We are looking toward legislation in countries throughout Asia to establish the direction and the way that we practice. The AOC also provides education with symposiums and our regular conferences.

Part of our mindset is to encourage student optometrists to get involved in our activities. We feel that it is our responsibility to set and to inspire leadership in the next generation. The AOC coordinates an exchange of students so that student optometrists in different regions can learn from each other and return to share what they’ve learned. With any profit that we make from our sponsors, a portion goes back to the host country to run professional activities and to provide bursaries to students.

The AOC is blessed to have the collaboration with the Global Myopia Symposium and now with the Global Specialty Lens Symposium, which allows all of us to learn from and to benefit each other.

We launched a peer-review journal in 2021 titled Journal of Optometry, Eye and Health Research that publishes twice a year through the Management & Science University in Malaysia. It’s not a purely academic journal; it has a section for industry submissions, so it’s a balance between science and professional marketing and industry content.

Tell us your vision for the contact lens field in the short term (less than 5 years) and in the long term (20 years from now).

Before I touch on this topic, I want to first state that we need to narrow the gap in the level of contact lens practice in Asia. To that end, we’ve developed the Contact Lens Practice Guideline (CLPG), because before we go further, we need to make sure that the foundation and the fundamentals of safe and healthy contact lens wear are right. The CLPG covers the proper way to perform contact lens fitting, follow-ups, and aftercare.

We need to change the mindset of how practitioners prescribe optical solutions. Contact lenses are not just items that we buy or sell or prescribe, they are a treatment component of eyecare service delivery. They have and will continue to cross beyond vision correction purposes to biosensing and slow release of medications and other technologies. We will see all aspects from aesthetic to functional. Then, with the foundation of the CLPG, contact lenses will have a great future. CLS