I am writing ahead of the Spring Budget on 6th March 2024 to urge you to increase investment in eye health care.
In Parliament, it has been my mission to improve access to good quality eye health care when and where one needs it. There are currently two
million people living in the UK with sight loss with that number set to rise to four million by 2050.
The NHS is under severe pressure for all conditions but in eye health it is particularly concerning. Ophthalmology is currently the busiest outpatient speciality in secondary care with more than 600,000 people waiting and makes up almost 10% of the entire waiting list.
Yet, despite the worrying statistics, the crisis in eye health care continues to be ignored which is especially concerning given that 50% of all sight loss is avoidable.
Moreover, sight loss currently costs the UK economy over £36 billion a year.
I believe that there is an eye health care emergency, and the government must take urgent action to tackle it by providing more investment in
the NHS for eye health care which would:
• Increase workforce capacity and training by boosting recruitment and better retention of ophthalmologists and clinical staff.
• Fund more clinical placements so optometrists can complete Independent Prescribing (IP) and Higher Qualifications (HQs) in order to increase capacity in primary care.
• Improve digital connectivity between primary, community and secondary eye care by upgrading IT infrastructure.
• Ensure consistent commissioning of eye health services by ICBs in primary care to reduce pressures on secondary care.
• Fund the collection of national population data on blindness and visual impairment to better understand why people in the UK are losing their sight due to preventable causes, and why people continue to live with correctable visual impairments.
I believe investment in these areas will reduce the NHS backlog, prevent avoidable sight loss, and ensure the delivery of good quality eye health care that everyone can access, when and where they need it.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Marsha de Cordova MP