UUPer and assistant clinical professor Daniella Rutnet, right, conducts an eye examination on a patient at SUNY Optometry.

One of Harriette Canellos’ patients was a 45-year-old woman with advanced glaucoma.

“She had no insurance and no job. She would have gone blind if she did not get treatment,” recalled Canellos, an associate clinical professor at SUNY Optometry. Without hesitation, Canellos provided the patient what she needed to preserve her sight.

“Nobody is turned away,” she said, a position reiterated by one of her colleagues and fellow UUPer, assistant clinical professor Daniella Rutner.

“I never look at a person’s wallet when I treat them,” Rutner, another teaching optometrist, stated. “I look at what they need and prescribe what they need, not what they can afford.”

Canellos and Rutner may work amid affluence on 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan, where real estate is among the most expensive in the world. But some who live in poverty residing not far away know the doors of the University Optometric Center are open to them.

While saying that they don’t offer a free clinic, Canellos explained, “When we have someone who cannot pay, Optometry has a social work fund that helps them. The social work department is very much a part of the team.”

That fund has a current balance of $50,000 that can be used to cover all or part of a patient’s treatment, including prescription drugs.

The care provided goes far beyond the basic.

“In everything I do, I’m treating the entire patient,” Rutner said. “I look at the health of the entire individual. It tells me if their eye disease is indicative of other diseases.”

Canellos put it another way: “The eye is the window to the rest of the body.”

Both doctors stress that Optometry offers patients — regardless of their income — a number of services not readily found elsewhere.

“We have state-of-the-art equipment that many other clinics cannot afford,” Canellos stressed.

Among their services is the Children with Special Needs Unit, offering care for a wide range of conditions that require much more than routine examinations. Optometry also provides special contact lenses not ordinarily offered in private practice, for those with severe corneal disease. Rutner gets satisfaction from the clinic’s “low vision’’ service, which treats patients whose sight has been severely reduced.

“Patients are so happy they can see. I get goose bumps,” she said.

Both not only teach their students the skills they need to be optometrists; they also pass along the sense of protecting those in need. Rutner said students see that they don’t stint on the level of care provided whether a patient can pay or not. Canellos said they send students to clinics in low-income neighborhoods in the metropolitan area, where they take care of people in poor health.

“It infuses within our students a spirit of giving,” she said.

Optometry Chapter President John Picarelli points out that UUP safeguards the exemplary work its members perform on behalf of the community.

“UUP tries to get the best budget it can for the college to subsidize our clinics,” he said. “Our chapter’s members have written letters and come to Albany to fight for their share of the budget.”

While Picarelli is very proud of UUP’s support for the services provided at Optometry, he cautions that without the union’s advocacy, those services may not exist.

“I think without UUP, the SUNY hospitals would be separated from SUNY. I’ve told our members that if they were able to remove Syracuse (Upstate Medical University) from SUNY, they could do it to all of us.”

—Donald Feldstein