Maintaining healthy vision for his clients is what Dr. Royland Samms is focused on. The owner of Atlantic Vision Care in Hamilton spoke with Royal Gazette business reporter Alex Wright about his life and career.

The next time you get your eyes checked it may not just be a pair of glasses you need. It could be treatment for cataracts, glaucoma, diabetes or high blood pressure, or even brain tumours or cancer.

And that is where Dr. Royland Samms comes in, for the owner of Atlantic Vision Care in Hamilton offers the complete vision care service from eye tests for children and adults to checking up on the health of his patients.

He also prescribes glasses, contact lenses (including standard disposables, custom fits, prosthetic lenses and bifocals), lasik pre and post-operative assessment and treatment, and referrals.

"In this profession the kind of work is really varied," he said.

"It includes dealing with retail part of the business, managing the clinic, administration and working with other health care professionals, as well as educating your patients.

"No two days are exactly the same and that is what I love about the job."

Having been born in Jamaica, Dr. Samms moved with his family to Canada (including Ontario, Quebec and Alberta provinces) before going to study at Atlantic University College in Massachusetts for two years, where he met his wife Shawne-rica in 1987, and then onto the State University of New York to read a BSc degree in Biology.

He returned to Toronto for nine months, but it was not long before he started his career in earnest at Ohio State University's College of Optometry in 1991, graduating with a degree in optometry four years later, and going on to do a variety of jobs for the next three years from running a LensCrafters store in Columbus, Ohio to working for a retinal surgeon and at an inner city welfare clinic, and even part-time at Wal-Mart, finally arriving in Bermuda 11 years ago.

"The first thing that got me interested in optometry as a career was a career fair at my church in Edmonton where an optometrist was speaking and I found it very interesting," he said.

"At the time I was studying at Atlantic Union College in Massachusetts and I was interested in law and something to do with health care, so I sat down in the library one day and pulled out all the information they had in the various career paths I thought I was interested in to find out who were the professionals in those fields and whether I would like to do them as a job.

"In the end I narrowed it down to optometry, orthopaedic surgery, ophthalmology and constitutional law, which was quite wide-ranging, so I tried to get appointments with different people in those professions to see what I would find interesting and what type of people they were.

"Law was a lot of reading and paper work involved, and the ophthalmologist I went to see sent out his assistant to talk to me, so I thought, 'What kind of job is this where someone does not have time to speak to a student looking to get into the profession', but the two optometrists I went to see were really enthusiastic and encouraging about what they did and gave me a very good impression of the profession and helped me to decide to pursue it as a career."

Dr. Samms started working with Dr. Henry Simmons at his optometry practice for four years before deciding to branch out on his own with Mrs. Samms, setting up Atlantic Vision Care based in Reid Street in 2002, using the deeds put up by his wife's parents for their house, a loan from Butterfield Bank and backing from the Bermuda Small Business Development Corporation.

Since then the business has gone from strength to strength and grown to 10 staff, including three doctors, three technicians, two opticians, a receptionist, an office manager, Mrs. Samms, who manages the cash and deposits and orders and checks the inventory, and an operations manager, Cornell Fubler, who first gave him the idea to become his own boss, as well as two part-time employees.

A typical day in the life of Dr. Samms, who is chairman of the Bermuda Optometrist & Opticians Council, starts at 8 a.m. when he comes into work, attending to administrative duties for the first hour and in between appointments, before carrying out eye tests and examinations, fitting and repairing spectacles, referring patients to optometrists and doing pre-lasik assessments and treatment after surgery from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Thursday, finishing at 1 p.m. on Friday.

"When I first started out there was a waiting list before I opened the door," he said.

"To start with, when it was just my wife and myself for the first three years, we worked from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and sometimes even 7 p.m., and then cut the lenses for the glasses between then and 12 a.m., and when we came back from vacation it would often be until 4 a.m.

"We have been lucky that we have never really had any lean times — there has always been demand for the service, which is rare."

He is constantly upgrading and updating his business with improved technology and an intranet recording the data of all his patients.

But one of his biggest challenges has been to attract Bermudians to the profession and once they are on board the length of time taken to train them up and get them properly qualified. Among the many changes he has seen during his time in the industry has been the modernisation of glasses and the introduction of high quality designer named brands such as Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana to Bermuda.

Dr. Samms has also spearheaded a new act which was just passed last month allowing optometrists on the Island to prescribe medicine for the treatment of eye diseases.

He views optometrists in the US, Canada and the UK as his main competition and is keen to balance providing a good quality service which is value for money despite facing a number of big expenses, including rent.

Among some of the funniest moments Dr. Samms has experienced during his time checking out people's eyes, are patients getting their left and right mixed up when asked to look one way or the other, and asking whether to look with both eyes in a certain direction.

Meanwhile, his message to computer users is to take regular breaks and not stare at their screens for too long to avoid eye, neck and back aches. He advises construction workers to wear proper eye protection and is keen to dispel the myth that wearing glasses is a bad thing.

Dr. Samms, who has a son Jordan and daughter Reyna, likes to get out on the golf course to unwind in his leisure time, often with Dr. Black, who was reunited at Atlantic Vision Care with his associate and former classmate from Ohio State University and business partner from LensCrafters, hitting the fairways and greens of Ocean View Golf Course and Belmont Hills Golf Club and he hopes to get down to Port Royal Golf Course again when it reopens soon.

As a Seventh-day Adventist, Dr. Samms is a keen churchgoer, doing the audio/visuals for the church radio, and when he reaches 50, plans to explore a number of interests, including possibly going on an overseas mission.

For now though, he is fully focused on the task at hand — that of keeping his clients happy and healthy.