About us

Sight Tests

Frames

Please excuse our dust whilst this site is being worked on :o)

Gill’s Independent Eyecare

228/230 Churchill Square

The Victoria Shopping Centre

Southend

SS2 5SB

01702 640112

Lenses

Contact Lenses

Optomap

Maui Jim

NHS Eligibility

Contact us

How much does a sight test cost?

An eye test is free if you are eligible.

The current fee for a private sight test is £22.00.

The current fee for an Optomap photographic examination is £19.50 for adults and £14.00 for children under 16.

A lot more happens during an eye examination than purely testing to see if you need glasses.

Never was the phrase ‘The eyes are the windows to the soul’ more true than when you are having an eye examination. The eyes are unique as it is the only time blood vessels can be seen without surgical intervention. This is why an eye examination is so important; often it can be the first time indicators of conditions which can affect other parts of the body are seen, conditions such as diabetic bleeds, or vessels within the retina which indicate high blood pressure, to name but two. So, when we examine your eyes we check for function and health.

We carry out retinoscopy during which our opticians can approximately ascertain any prescription. We refine this by asking a few simple questions - the ‘clearer or more blurred’ questions. Then we check your eyes binocularly to see how they work together.

During ophthalmoscopy (when the optician shines a light into your eye) we check the health of the eye from front to back, looking for signs of anything which could be adversely affecting your quality of vision, such as cataracts and macular degeneration. During ophthalmoscopy the optician will also have a good look at the optic nerve to see if there are any indicators of glaucoma (high pressure within the eye) and this check can be further refined with a quick and simple measurement of the pressure within the eye. You may have had this done before with a puff of air against the eye, but we know it makes you jump and a lot of people didn’t like it, so we got a new, much smaller, hand-held device which very quickly takes accurate measurements, and most people say they can hardly feel it.

As part of these tests we perform various other checks on your eyes, such as muscle balances etc.

Other checks we may perform that are all included within the routine examination are:

Visual field tests - where we build up a map of how well the retina is sending the visual signals it receives to the visual cortex of the brain.

Ishihara plates - the examination of how accurately the retina recognises colour.

Stereopsis - an additional check on binocular vision.

Picture or Number test charts - for those patients unfamiliar with letters.

To further enhance an eye examination we recommend the Optomap Photographic Retinal Examination. During a routine test our optician gets to see around 30% of your retina, the remainder is hidden from us by the confines of your pupil. The Optomap can photograph up to 90% of the retina, enabling us to check previously obscured areas of the retina for very early signs of conditions which may affect your vision and/or general health. See our Optomap page for more details.