NHS Long Term Plan

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on securing this debate. There can hardly be a more timely and pertinent subject for debate at present than the case for a fully funded, comprehensive and integrated health and social care system in the context of the new NHS Long Term Plan. We have only three minutes, so I shall concentrate on just one thing which I actually know something about: eye health and visual impairment. In doing so, I declare my interest as a vice-president of RNIB and co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Eye Health and Visual Impairment.

Sight is the sense that people most fear losing. Ophthalmology has the second-highest number of out-patient appointments of any specialty. Due to demographic factors, the number of people in the UK affected by sight loss is projected to rise by more than 10% by 2020 and more than 40% by 2030. The British Ophthalmological Surveillance Unit—BOSU—found that more than 200 people every year experience severe and permanent sight loss due to delayed and cancelled appointments. Yet, extraordinarily, there is no mention of ophthalmology in the long-term plan.

For these reasons, my all-party parliamentary group undertook an inquiry into capacity problems in NHS eyecare services and the commissioning and planning of such services in England. The inquiry was supported by an independent secretariat hosted by RNIB, and funded by the Bayer pharmaceutical company, which had no role in the scope, development or delivery of the inquiry, however. The inquiry’s report—See the Light: Improving Capacity in NHS Eye Care in England—was published last June and contained 16 recommendations. Obviously I cannot go into all of them in any detail now, but they include measures: to ensure that eye health is accorded higher priority; on how capacity issues are addressed by sustainability and transformation partnership plans; to ensure that the national tariff for ophthalmology does not disadvantage patients at particular risk of avoidable sight loss who require follow-up appointments; and to ensure that patients requiring follow-up appointments are seen within clinically appropriate timescales.

Finally, eye clinic liaison officers—ECLOs—play a vital role in signposting patients to support in the community following the often devastating trauma of a diagnosis of sight loss, but their availability is patchy. RNIB is therefore calling for all ophthalmology departments to offer ECLO support. I would be glad to learn from the Minister the department’s thinking on how ECLO services could be rolled out throughout the eyecare service, and to hear that the department is both taking our all-party group’s recommendations seriously and working for their implementation.