Eye Health and Macular Disease

Matthew Offord Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for securing the debate.

I first became interested in eye health as a child when I wore glasses and had extreme myopia. That manifested itself in 2011 when I had my first detached retina and experienced the possibility of losing my eyesight. I had a second detached retina that necessitated an operation at Moorfields. That was two detached retinas, and I subsequently required cataract operations on both eyes.

My clinical experience at Moorfields was very good and I had no problem with that. However, when I had subsequent check-ups for glaucoma, there was an excessive number of people per session. On occasion, my consultant was treating up to 100 people in under three hours, which greatly concerned me. This is an issue about which I have always been passionate, more so when constituents came to me and said that they had experienced problems, not only with glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration but with cataracts. I realised that this was a problem across the whole of society.

In 2019, the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) called for a national strategy for eye health, which I support. More recently, in response to a written question, the Government stated that there were no plans to develop a national strategy for eye health and that, given the size and variety of health needs in England, the approach should be managed locally.

That is not a view that I share. As the hon. Member for Strangford said, the number of people waiting for treatment on the NHS for eye-related conditions has increased during the pandemic. We are certainly aware of that, but what is most troubling is that clinical commissioning groups ration the number of operations for conditions, including cataracts. A survey in 2017 of ophthalmic leads shows that some CCGs apply even stricter access to patients needing surgery on a second eye. That means, as has been said, that people are unable to drive and, certainly, unable to read, and have great difficulty accessing normal sight due to the need to wear a single glass lens in a pair of glasses, rather than glasses for one eye.

I have struggled with the possibility of losing my sight, both as a Member of Parliament and as an individual. May I tell the Minister that it is a difficult diagnosis to receive when someone says, “If you do not have this operation, you will lose your sight. If you have it, you will probably save your sight. We have to tell you that, if you do not have it, you will definitely lose your sight”?

I have been keen to campaign for more eye clinic liaison officers. I have repeatedly asked Ministers about the number of eye clinic liaison officers and how we could have more. The response has always been that they are funded by CCGs based on assessment of need. In dealing with the impact of sight loss, the actions of ECLOs in helping people through their support and rehabilitation has always been judged to be of great value. In September 2021, a response that I received to a written question said:

“Eye clinics and their staff, including Eye Clinic Liaison Officers, are commissioned, and funded by individual Clinical Commissioning Groups on the basis of local assessments of need, details of which are not routinely collected centrally.”

Once again, we go back to the point of having the issues decided at local level, with the Department of Health and Social Care not knowing how many officers are in attendance.

The Department is keen to highlight the additional £2 billion that is going into the NHS this year—£8 billion over three years—to increase activity on the elective care backlog caused by the pandemic and other factors. We welcome that, but I have a problem with Ministers never identifying where any of the money will be awarded. Eye health is never identified, so we do not know how many elective operations will occur in the next year or the next three years. The Department also says:

“NHS England and NHS Improvement’s National Eye Care Recovery and Transformation programme aims to transform secondary care ophthalmology services by using existing funding more effectively to improve service quality and patient outcomes.”

That seems to counteract an assertion that any of the £2 billion this year, or the £8 billion over three years, will be allocated directly to eye care.

I have two asks of the Minister. The first is to establish, promote and publish a national eye health strategy for England. The second is to identify and allocate resources to ophthalmology so that we can say to our constituents that, when they need the NHS at a moment that could effectively end their productive life through the loss of their sight, we will be there for them.