How to Book an Eye Test for Your Parents in Delhi or Gurugram
It’s usually a small thing that sets it off. Your mother mentions on a video call that she’s stopped reading the newspaper because the print “seems smaller these days.” Your father squints at his phone and holds it further away than he used to. You make a mental note to look into it next time you’re home — except “next time you’re home” might be eight months away, and eyesight problems don’t wait that politely.
If you’re an NRI trying to arrange a proper eye check-up for parents in Delhi, Gurugram, Faridabad, or Noida without being there yourself, the good news is that this has become a genuinely solvable problem. Here’s exactly how to go about it.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds From Abroad
Booking a doctor’s appointment from another country sounds simple until you actually try it. A few things make it more complicated than it should be:
- You don’t know which hospital or ophthalmologist is actually reliable, and reviews online are often unhelpful or contradictory.
- Your parents may downplay symptoms on the phone because they don’t want to worry you, so you’re often working with incomplete information.
- Coordinating appointment timings across time zones, especially for a call where you actually want to speak to the doctor, is its own logistical headache.
- If a hospital visit is needed, someone has to physically get your parents there and back, which isn’t always something a driver or a neighbour can be relied on for.
- You want to see the actual results yourself, not just get a secondhand summary from a parent who may not fully remember or understand what the doctor said.
None of this is unique to eye care, but vision problems in particular tend to get deprioritised precisely because they develop slowly and rarely feel urgent — until a fall, a missed medication dose because a label couldn’t be read, or a diagnosis that’s caught later than it should have been.
The Home Eye Test Option
EyeSetu’s home eye testing service was built around a fairly simple idea: instead of your parents needing to travel to a hospital, a trained team brings hospital-grade diagnostic equipment directly to their home in Delhi, Gurugram, Faridabad, or Noida. For NRI families specifically, this removes almost every friction point mentioned above.
Here’s what a booking actually looks like, step by step.
Step 1: Book the Appointment Yourself, From Wherever You Are
You don’t need to route this through your parents at all if you’d rather not. Booking can be done directly online or over a call, using your own phone number and email for confirmations and updates. You choose the date and time slot that works around your parents’ routine, and everything from that point is coordinated directly with the visiting team.
Step 2: A Trained Team Visits Your Parents’ Home
On the scheduled day, an optometrist visits with the same category of diagnostic equipment used in leading eye hospitals — this isn’t a basic vision chart and a torch. Depending on what’s needed, the visit can include a full vision and refraction check, intraocular pressure measurement for glaucoma screening, a slit lamp exam, and fundus photography to check the retina and optic nerve.
Most standard visits take around 30 to 45 minutes, and your parents don’t need to prepare anything beyond being at home and reasonably rested.
Step 3: Results Are Reviewed the Same Day, By Video
This is the part that matters most for families managing care remotely. Once the tests are done, the findings go to an AIIMS-trained ophthalmologist — often Dr. Shikha Gupta or another senior member of the EyeSetu team — who reviews them and joins a live teleconsultation the same day. You can be on that call too, from wherever you are, so you hear the diagnosis and recommendations directly rather than through a relayed, partially remembered version from a parent.
Step 4: You Get a Digital Report, Not Just a Verbal Summary
After the consultation, a digital report is shared with both your parents and you, covering what was tested, what was found, and what’s recommended next — whether that’s a glasses prescription, a monitoring schedule for a condition like glaucoma, or a referral for further treatment. This is worth keeping on file, particularly for chronic conditions where tracking change over time matters more than any single reading.
Step 5: If Further Care Is Needed, It’s Coordinated For You
If the results point to something requiring more than routine monitoring — cataract surgery, for instance — EyeSetu’s SurgiSetu programme manages the entire process: pre-operative workup, scheduling the procedure at a partner hospital (including iClinix’s centres across Delhi NCR), and post-operative follow-up visits and teleconsultations. For an NRI managing this from abroad, this is often the single most valuable part of the service, since it means you’re not left trying to find a surgeon, book a hospital slot, and arrange transport all on your own, long-distance.
What It Costs
Home consultations start at approximately ₹1,200 — a figure Dr. Shikha Gupta, EyeSetu’s founder and a former AIIMS RP Centre consultant of 17 years, points out is often less than what a family ends up spending on fuel, parking, and a full day’s lost wages just getting to a hospital appointment in Delhi traffic. Additional tests beyond the basic check, such as OCT or visual field testing for glaucoma monitoring, are priced separately depending on what’s clinically needed.
What to Have Ready Before You Book
A few things make the process smoother:
- Your parents’ approximate address and a workable time window for the visit
- Any existing glasses prescription or eye reports, if available, even if outdated
- A list of current medications, particularly for diabetes or blood pressure, since these affect eye health
- Your own availability for the video consultation, if you’d like to join it live
Why This Matters More Than It Might Seem To
Several of the most common causes of preventable vision loss in older adults — glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), and cataracts — often go undetected or unaddressed until meaningful damage has already occurred. India has an estimated 11.2 million people aged 40 and above living with glaucoma, and by most estimates, roughly 80% of them don’t know they have it, according to ophthalmologists cited in a recent report by The Tribune. For NRI families, the distance itself can end up being the main reason a parent’s eye health slips through the cracks — not neglect, just the simple difficulty of getting someone to a hospital appointment when nobody local is available to take them.
Booking a home eye test removes that specific obstacle. It won’t replace being there in person, but it does mean your parents’ eyesight doesn’t have to wait for your next visit home.
