30 April 2025

‘Investment in eye care is a necessity, not a luxury’, says APPG

by Hannah Williams

Representatives from across the eye care sector joined parliamentarians to discuss the need for urgent action to prioritise eye health within the NHS 10 Year Health Plan, to help close the gap between rising demand and long waits for care.

Marsha De Cordova, MP for Battersea, chaired a panel discussion. "This event is about ensuring we embed eye care in the plan," she said. "It is about what changes we need to see to improve services."

Shockat Adam, MP for Leicester South and the first practising optometrist to be elected to parliament, said that eye care did not have the same status as other primary care services including dentistry or GP practice. Stressing its importance he said: "Sight loss may not kill you, but if you ask anyone which sense they would least like to lose, they mostly say sight."

Mr Adam said it was important to use the skills of healthcare professions on the high street to provide more services and to help reduce cases of irreversible sight loss. "We have to be in a position where we prevent sight loss in the first place," he said, urging the government not to be shortsighted. "Prevention saves the Treasury hundreds of millions of pounds" in treating avoidable consequences of sight loss, including fractures from falls and mental health conditions, he added.

As of July 2024, there were 613,000 patients on NHS waiting lists for eye care in England, 15,000 of whom were waiting for more than a year, with some going blind while they waited for care. An estimated 50% of sight loss is avoidable.

There was widespread support for the government's three promised big shifts for the NHS: sickness to prevention, hospital to community; and analogue to digital.

Dilani Siriwardena, vice president of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, said she welcomed the shift in focus and said that technology had the potential to make transformational changes within eye care. "This can only be done with government support and an IT system that integrates optometry and ophthalmology," to bring efficiencies through collaborative working, she said.

Sam Fox, from the Essex Sight Loss Council, lost her sight in 2014 after developing kidney failure and getting a late diagnosis of glaucoma. She urged those present not to forget the patient when making policy, highlighting the need to implement the Accessible Information Standard. She said there remained many barriers to care for people like her, explaining that she still received appointment letters, missed appointment letters and subsequent discharge letters that she could not read.

Mike Wordingham, from the RNIB, said there was real support for the three shifts but also concerns about loss of human contact and digital exclusion. "It is vital that a cross-section of the blind and partially sighted is at the heart of the 10 Year Plan," he said, adding that this population needed to have confidence and trust in the eye care professionals that served them.