Meet the team
Your eye health comes first to our highly skilled, friendly and professional team; many of whom have been with Ashleigh Sight Care for over 10 years! With branches in Romsey, Southampton/Portswood and Bishops Waltham you can be assured that our expert team with a wide range of specialist skills are highly qualified to look after your visual health. All our professional staff are registered with the General Optical Council and bound by The Opticians Act to ensure their registration is up to date with constant education, training and continuous improvement programs.
Here is a selection of our staff. Some team members are based at one of our branches permanently while others work at a number of our practices.
Dr. Claudia Ashleigh
Claudi is Ashleigh Sight Care’s Owner and Director. Born in Münster in Germany in 1968, she completed her Dispensing Optician apprenticeship with Optic Saabe in 1991 and enrolled at City University London for the Optometry degree in 1993, following a hunch that her future in Optics lay in the UK. After three years in the heart of London, she completed her pre-registration year with Matherson Optometrists in Surrey in 1997 and gained a Batchelor of Science degree with Honours that same year, writing her Dissertation about the History of Contact Lenses, which from then on became a lifelong passion. Claudi went on to marry one of her fellow students, Bish Ashleigh in 1998 and together they have two boys. She founded Ashleigh Sight Care a year later, starting with the store in Portswood Road, quickly expanding to Romsey three years later. In 2008, her husband Bish joint the company, retiring from his longstanding post as Resident Optometrist at Vision Express in Portsmouth. It was then that the two of them expanded the company to a total of five stores, adding Portsmouth, Fair Oak and Bishops Waltham to the Company’s locations. In 2010, Claudi decided to go back to University to study for the Doctorate of Optometry, bringing her career in Optics full circle. Seven years later, she gained her Doctorate from London South Bank University writing a Comparison Study of two Silicone Hydrogel multifocal soft contact lenses for her thesis in 2017, carrying on her passion for contact lenses of all kinds. When Covid came along, her husband Bish retired from Optics and the Company was purposely shrunk to just three remaining locations. In Portswood, Bishops Waltham and Romsey Claudi is keeping busy, sharing the eye examinations with her colleague Tamlyn Taylor and employing a dedicated team of Dispensing Opticians, Optical Advisors and Receptionists to serve the public in all things optical. Her special interest in optics are still contact lenses of all kinds and she is especially known to fit rare, complicated gas permeable and soft lenses of all kinds, expanding her knowledge to myopia control contact lenses for children and young adults, to help tackle the challenges of this ever-growing epidemic of today’s world together with her patients in the community. In her spare time, Claudi is a keen open water swimmer and practices Pilates and Yoga. All her spare time is spent outdoors in her garden with her family or with her head in a book.
