Specsavers has launched Horizon30, a five-year strategy for its Australian and New Zealand network that sets out to deliver 30 million “life-changing experiences” for patients by 2030.
The plan spans five business pillars: care, customer, growth, people, and partnership. For Specsavers’ optometrists the details that matter sit inside the care pillar: making myopia management the standard of care, building a more child-centric testing experience, and widening access to advanced dry eye treatment.
Specsavers said Horizon30 was shaped by feedback gathered from store partners, optometrists, audiology professionals, and support office teams, alongside outside experts brought in for industry context. Tom Craw, Specsavers’ Managing Director Audiology ANZ, said the process was designed around that input to ensure it reflected “both the realities of today and the opportunities ahead”.
Paul Bott, Specsavers’ Managing Director Optics ANZ, pointed to previous rounds of clinician feedback as evidence the model works. “Previous years of clinician feedback have led us to rolling out advanced dry eye treatments, implementing technological advancements to simplify the administration tasks of clinical staff, and even investing in KeepSight,” he said, referring to the diabetes eye care program that now keeps more than 42% of Australians with diabetes engaged in regular eye care.
What 30 Million Actually Measures
Dr Ben Ashby, Director of Optometry for Specsavers Australia New Zealand, was closely involved in shaping the plan’s clinical direction and is upfront that the headline figure is a simple count of visits, not an outcomes measure. “It’s anyone who comes into one of our consultation rooms, both optometry and audiology, across our network,” he said, adding that the target takes into consideration “a combination of our current stores growing, new stores opening, and more optometrists and audiologists to care for all those people”. Every visit counts toward the total, whether a patient is on a two-year recall or being seen every six months.
Making Myopia Management Standard of Care
Around 45% of myopic children seen in Specsavers stores are currently enrolled in some form of myopia management. The company wants that at 80% by 2030, one leg of what it calls a “triple 80” ambition, alongside 80% of children needing vision correction receiving it, and an 80 net promoter score (a measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction) for children and their families.
To make myopia management a standard of care, Specsavers has looked at how to reduce the main barrier to entry: price. “We don’t generally find that parents are against myopia management, but unfortunately it is quite an expensive option,” Dr Ashby observed.
To overcome this hurdle, Specsavers has reduced the price of its entry-level spectacle for myopia control, MyoWise, by around 40% per pair, bringing it to roughly a quarter of the cost of the premium HOYA lens it also sells.
Dr Ashby is transparent about the trade-off: MyoEyes, designed by the Spanish company Indizen Optical Technologies and researched at the University of Madrid, achieves roughly a 30% reduction in myopia progression, compared to around 60% for the premium lens. “Our strategy is to get people that have no form of myopia management into this one,” he said. “It’s less effective than the premium lens, but infinitely more effective than just single vision lenses.” Families choosing MyoEyes get the same progression-based warranty as the premium option, so the guarantee does not change depending on which lens a family can afford.
Redesigning Eye Care for Kids
Paediatric eye care, more broadly, is a key focus of the Horizon30 plan and to support optometrists, Specsavers has boosted its existing continuing professional development, with, for example, sessions run by Dr Kate Gifford of Myopia Profile.
Additionally, the company has redesigned its entire delivery of paediatric products and services.
In the past, Dr Ashby said, “we kind of treated kids like mini adults, to be completely honest… Over time we’ve had the opportunity to break all of the people we care for down into different demographics, and it’s got to the point where we can spend more time looking at how the journey for kids needs to be different.”
This has translated into redesigned frame ranges built to specifications from Dr Alicia Thompson, Director of Education, Research, and Professional Development at the Association of British Dispensing Opticians. These frames now covering around 60% of the children’s range and that’s rising as stock is renewed. Additionally, Specsavers has introduced child-height merchandising, booster seats for refraction chairs in every store, and a set of colourful characters called Optomonsters to make eye examinations fun rather than frightening.
Advancing Dry Eye Care
Following a successful pilot, more than 150 Specsavers stores now offer intense pulsed light and low light therapy for dry eye, with around 2,000 new patients treated in the past three months at AU$600 for a four-treatment course. The company is now piloting a lower-cost, single-session in-room lid treatment, aimed at anterior blepharitis and meibomian gland dysfunction, priced at approximately $200 and repeated once or twice a year depending on severity.
Acknowledging that the treatment itself isn’t new, Dr Ashby said “it could have been done before, (but) we generally don’t do something unless we believe we can do it for better value than everyone else, which means making it widely available”. Rolling it out has meant building a standardised protocol, consistent pricing, training, and allocating advertising resources for stores first, rather than leaving adoption to individual clinicians.
Expanding Access to Eye Care
Globally, Specsavers is re-platforming its practice management system onto an online-capable base, opening the door to telehealth. Australia will roll out first, just ahead of the United Kingdom, with completion anticipated by 2030. Dr Ashby said Australia was chosen for its “change readiness”, having efficiently managed previous system rollouts and a store network used to frequent updates.
The first patient-facing feature is expected to be pre-visit questionnaires, enabling patients to share as much or as little information as they choose before a consultation. Specsavers is also monitoring ambient scribe technology, though Dr Ashby would not commit to a date for implementation. “I think it’s a question of if and not when, but I don’t quite know the when,” he said, noting that existing administrative technology has already freed up around five minutes of consultation time per patient over the past five years.
Culture the Key
The key to successfully implementing Horizon30, Dr Ashby said, is to maintain the current positive culture, as evidenced by results from various independent surveys such as Great Places to Work and the ACE franchise partner survey. “Plans may change over time… Horizon30 guides us on what we want to get to by 2030, but as much effort is going into making sure the culture remains at the core of what it always has been, which is around looking after our people and changing lives through better sight and hearing,” Dr Ashby said.
Specsavers currently operates 450 practices across Australia and New Zealand. Its 400th Australian store opened in Hamilton, Victoria in July. And as Dr Ashby laid out, when it comes to reaching the 30 million target, growing store numbers, expanding clinician capacity, and maintaining a positive culture, rather than the plan itself, will be the deciding factors.
