What happens in an eye test?

You will need to set aside 45 minutes for an eyetest with us.  In this time your optometrist will check out your eyes inside and out, looking for eyesight conditions (like short-sightedness, long-sightedness, astigmatism and presbyopia) as well as eye health conditions (like cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration, retinal detachment, diabetic retinopathy, and so on).

You will have digital retinal photographs taken and optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans done, and you will get to see the results straight-away.

What other tests might be done?

• History – this will include questions about your general health, what you do day to day, past eye history and family eye history.  You get to tell us what you want and need.
• Visual acuities – how far down the eye chart you can see.
• Motility – making sure your eyes move like they should.
• Confrontation – checking how far sideways you can see with your peripheral vision.
• Pupil function – testing your change in pupil size with a bright light.
• Retinoscopy – a way for us to estimate your glasses prescription without you answering any questions at all.
• Refraction – the way for us to confirm your glasses prescription with your input (one or two, one or two…)
• Tonometry – measuring your eye pressure.  This is part of the glaucoma test.
• Slit lamp examination – a powerful microscope which makes your eyeballs about the size of a large beachball for us to look at and into.
• Retinal photography – digital photographs taken of the inside of your eyeballs, so you get to see what we see – straight-away.
• OCT – in much the same way as a CT scan looks through brain tissue, OCT scans look through retinal tissue.  It’s like a CT scan for your eye.  Very handy for monitoring conditions like glaucoma and macular degeneration.
• Pachymetry – Our OCT machine can also measure the thickness of your cornea.
• Visual Field Testing – to measure your peripheral vision.
• Dilation –trying to look into an eye through a small pupil is like looking into a room through a keyhole.  We may need to dilate your pupils with eyedrops to ensure we have a really good look.