How do we use your registration fees?

Curious to know more about how registration fees are being used?

 

You can now renew your optician’s license online.  

 

Let’s get the technicality out of the way first

If you haven’t received an email from us on February 24th with renewal instructions:

1. Check if it’s not in your junk email box

2. Send an email to reception@cobc.ca with your correct email address.

 

As a registrant of the College, you are part of a self-regulating profession. The fees enable the College to develop Standards, provide resources to support opticians to meet the Standards, and act if they are not being met. All of this work helps build and maintain confidence in the opticianry profession. 

When you are licensed as an optician, you get the support to be your best professional self through:

• Protected titles to identify yourself as an optician
• Accountability to standards and ethics
• Requirements and guidelines for restricted activities
• Lifelong learning requirements
• Assessment of skills and knowledge(competency)
• Approved educational programs
• Patient relation guidelines and tools
• Public awareness

When you register with the College, you have worked hard and contribute to continuing at least 22 years history of safe, competent and ethical patient care, which is something we couldn’t do it without you. When you renew your registration each year, you are making personal investment that supports the trust of the public into the licensed opticians. It helps keep practice standards high and provide the resources and support you need, to be your best professional self.

More than 90% of the budget of the College is coming from the registration fees.

We would like to acknowledge the personal investment opticians make each year toward the regulation of the profession.

 

The College offers valuable supports for practice. If you face a complex practice situation or have questions about your scope of practice, you can discuss your issue and options with us. We also have a useful support content accessible on our website. College volunteers and staff are working hard to provide you the resources to be your best professional self and to regulate the profession.

In future articles, we touch on our more recurring activities and how we are always seeking continuous improvement to protect the public through regulation of the profession. But for now, we would like to share with you the other projects the College has been working on in particular this year:

 

This program aims to provide tools to enhance the relations between you and your patients. The first toolkit we are working on is regarding professional boundaries, in order to initiate discussion and awareness regarding the limits between where a professional relationship ends and a personal relationship begins.

 

This program updates the current continuing competency program to provide opticians the tool to create their competency profile and discover their areas of strengths and gaps. Opticians can use this data to guide their learning and actually improve any competency gaps.

 

The College bylaws and Standards of Practice are being updated to allow the organization to be more efficient and to provide more guidelines to help Opticians make practice decisions. Professional regulation is evolving and we recognized that there was a growing need for updates.

 

Protecting the public and facing current and future challenges of the profession are things that neither the College nor the LicensedOpticians can do alone. It requires working together co-operatively and seamlessly as one profession. This project is about improving the relationship between the College and opticians to better engage opticians to build strength and unity within the profession.

 

We received grant funding from the Ministry of Jobs to create online resources to help inform international applicants on their level of readiness to attempt licensing as an optician in Canada. This project is to help address the current and anticipated shortage of opticians in Canada with professionals trained in other countries.  

 

The Ministry of Jobs also provided grant funding to create a national database to help track the supply and demand of opticians acrossCanada and to ease the administration of opticians moving between provinces.This project will help us forecast where more opticians are needed/will be needed and to take action accordingly.

 

The College collaborates with other BC regulators and optician regulators across Canada to share costs and resources in order to regulate more effectively.

 

Let’s stay in touch

Transparency and honesty are key values to us. If you have any questions regarding this topic, feel free to contact us.

If you are interested in learning more about what we do on a regular basis and stay connected with us, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter.