Getting new glasses is different from screening for eye diseases, though it's typically done at the same time. I doubt a GP would have the special equipment they use for screening? It's pretty specialized.
Apparently the need for this gets more important as you get older:
Many optometrists don’t do much more than use a hand held scope to look into your eyes. I’d imagine most GPs either have that on hand already or could get it easily. It’s not like you need an MRI machine in the office to do an eye exam.
Yes some office have fancier equipment, but here it’s unclear if that’s actually better for patients and public health or just a way to bill more. Doing a basic exam and then referring those to true specialists is generally the model followed by nearly everything else in healthcare.
I have been to maybe a half dozen different optometrists over the last 25 years and they have always used several expensive looking machines to screen for eye disease. Most frequently a machine that uses a puff of air to measure the pressure in your eye and more recently, a machine with a bright light that gets detailed imagery of the vascular structure on the back of your eye.
Yes, although that test is automated and typically done by a technician not an optometrist. You can train someone to use one of these machines in a few hours. If this was a key test no reason we couldn’t just put one in every GP office and have eye pressure checked during an annual checkup.
Those machines cost money and require some amount of training to use. Having them in an office that specializes in using them makes sense. Having your GP have every type of machine for every types of checkup (eyes, ears, CAT, MRI, etc... all things that _could_ be at the GP, but aren't) would not be cost efficient.
Apparently the need for this gets more important as you get older:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/health-...