EH&S professionals throughout the United States are tasked with the difficult yet important task of setting up a prescription safety eyewear program which meets the needs and specifications of their organization and upper management.
In structuring a suitable prescription safety eyewear program, one of the foremost decisions that must be made relates to how the manager will get it’s employees in front of an optician for an initial measurement and post-production fitting.
Since prescription glasses are such a highly specialized good, and since prescription safety glasses in particular usually require a snug and secure fit, an optician must – at some point – be involved in the process to take these measurements.
These pre- and post-eyewear production fittings are what is considered “dispensing” are different safety eyewear dispensing options are available EH&S managers.
But what are these options?
Generally speaking, dispensing options include:
- Having an optician visit your jobsite for periodic or scheduled safety eyewear fitting.
- Sending employees offsite to a designated dispensing partner (optician).
- Having employees visit the optician of their choice for a purchase that will later be reimbursed by your purchasing department (or)
- Having employees visit the optician of their choice for preliminary measurements which will later be sent to a 3rd party lab (ex. internet purchases or designated lab)
A company will need to consider different variables when deciding which dispensing method is right for them.
For starters, will the given company’s purchasing department allow or tolerate intermittent reimbursements for expenditures related to prescription safety glasses? And can these purchases be made from different vendors or must they be consistent to one vendor? Also, does the company want to allow their employees the freedom to select any prescription safety eyewear frame they want? Or would they prefer to limit the selection to only those frames predetermined by management. How will payments be processed? Will employees be given a company credit card or PO#?
And don’t forget that both a PRE and POST fitting are generally required. Which brings about additional considerations such as twice the amount of time that employees will be of off the jobsite if using an offsite eyewear vendor or twice the amount of scheduled fittings if using an onsite optician.
A good recommendation is to have the answers to all of these types of questions figured out before you begin calling different vendors. Good luck!