Eye patients pay for private treatment – or risk going blind in NHS backlog

Patients are being forced to pay for urgent eye care or risk going blind because of long NHS waits.

MPs will today hear the scale of the “emergency” with four in five high street optometrists revealing their patients have paid for private procedures in the past six months.

Dame Andrea Leadsom, the former House of Commons leader, business secretary and environment secretary, is being called on to commit to improving NHS eye care in her new role as public health minister.

Four in five optometrists say they have patients waiting more than a year to be referred for an NHS appointment or treatment, according to analysis by the Association of Optometrists (AOP), leaving them at risk of going blind.

About 640,000 people are waiting for an NHS ophthalmology appointment, more than any other speciality – accounting for about one in 11 people on the 7.8 million waiting list.

About half of these people say their sight is deteriorating while they wait to be seen. Tens of thousands have been waiting more than a year, the AOP said.

In a letter to Dame Leadsom, Adam Sampson, the chief executive of the AOP, said that high street optometrists should be used more widely across the NHS for “cataract surgery, help for glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration”.

Mr Sampson said: “With the expansion of primary eye care services, more patients will have a better chance of receiving improved treatment, faster and locally, which could prevent avoidable irreversible sight loss.”

Read full story (paywalled)

Source: The Telegraph, 23 November 2023