Helping you to take care of your eyesight in Kingsbridge

Kingsbridge Eye Care has been a trusted part of the Kingsbridge community for more than 30 years. A family run business with a team of caring professionals across their three South Hams bases, here they explain how they can help you to take care of your eyesight both now and in the future…

Tell us about the background Kingsbridge Eye Care?

Nigel Frost is the owner of Kingsbridge Eye Care, he’s an optometrist and started the company nearly 30 years ago. He opened the first branch in Modbury, and then the second in Kingsbridge a couple of years later. The third opened in Salcombe in 2010.

It is a family run business. Nigel’s brother Kevin joined in 1997 as General Manager and does dispensing for glasses as well, and Nigel’s late father also worked in accounts for a long time. That family feel is still very much part of the business and its ethos, but we also pride ourselves on clinical excellence with a real focus on eye health checks and long term support for clients, which really separates us from other organisations.

Who’s in the team?

There are 15 of us across the three practices. Most of us are based in Kingsbridge. Nigel is an optometrist as well as Sammy and Danielle, who have been with us for 15 and 11 years respectively. We also have a team of dispensing opticians who help people to find the right glasses, a team of optometrist assistants, and we work with Adam Booth, who’s a consultant ophthalmologist.

What services do you provide?

We offer standard eye examinations as well as more in depth eye examinations as part of our Platinum Package, to really give people an insight into their eye health and plan for both now and in the future. The Platinum Package includes a full eye health examination, a visual field test and retinal photography, which can see 66% more than a standard site test so you get much earlier warnings of any problems.

Where we are different to other places is in that really high standard of care that allows us to help identify potential problems earlier. For example, we have an OCT scanning machine which scans the back of the eye to test for macular degeneration earlier than a standard test would. The same applies with our visual field machine, with which we do a lot of the testing for Kingsbridge hospital, to monitor any visual field loss in clients. It’s a machine that hospitals often have, but by having one here we can help speed up treatment for clients and patients.

With that package we give you 10% discount on glasses and lenses for the year. It’s a good starting point to get a baseline understanding of eye health so your optometrist can decide if you need to come in it every year or every two years. We generally advise doing that for your first visit as otherwise clients often don’t know that they have these issues until they’re quite advanced.

As mentioned, we are also linked with Adam who runs a clinic at our Kingsbridge site once a week, and we can refer clients to him if necessary. He specialises in glaucoma and cataracts.

Who can come to see you?

We are for all clients and all age groups from age one to 100 and beyond. We generally recommend that you come in once every two years, but if you have a family history of something then we may need to monitor it more often. We don’t recommend going without an eye test for more than two years at a time.

What are people most surprised about when they come to you?

How thorough it is. If you go for the Platinum Package, it takes a couple of hours, but people are usually quite happy about it at the end because it puts their minds at rest about any potential issues. All results are immediate and we go through them with you on the day, or if you don’t have time then we can arrange another occasion for you to come back.

What have you got coming up in the coming months?

We’ve teamed up with The Hearing Care partnership and we are now offering free hearing assessments as well. They do a standard one or a more in depth one, which takes 90 minutes. Similarly to eyesight, hearing is one of those things where you might think you can hear perfectly well and haven’t noticed that gradually it’s got a lot worse. By having that in the same place, we’re trying to make it easier for people to look after their health.

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