One in 10 new entrants to the Australian optometry workforce hail from New Zealand, with almost a third of this group settling in South Australia.
“It was surprising to me that during the eight-year period of the study, 11% (180 of 1680) of new entrants to the Australian optometry profession were graduates of the programme at Auckland University,” said lead author Jane Duffy, senior lecturer in optometry at Melbourne’s Deakin University.
Analysis of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) data showed after South Australia, New Zealand optometrists favoured New South Wales (30%) and Victoria (20%) with the remaining balance evenly split between Queensland and Western Australia, plus a few in the Australian Capital Territory, while Australian new entrants predominantly started work in the state where they undertook their optometry training, said Duffy.
The number of registered optometrists in Australia has grown by 30.1% in the past decade, driven by an increase in new optometry training programmes*, which is a far greater than population growth (12.1%); a discrepancy that’s causing some concern in the Australian industry.
The full study, Demographics and distribution of new entrants to the optometry profession in Australia, was published in Clinical and Experimental Optometry.
