Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 20 March 2019 to Question 231466, whether Public Health plans to make an assessment of the potential effect of changes to ophthalmic surgical practice on infection rates in hospitals; and whether such an assessment has been made of changes to NHS Tariff 2019/2020 HRG BZ91 which will have an effect on the number of concomitant treatments for cataracts and glaucoma.

Public Health England does not currently include ophthalmic surgery as part of mandatory or voluntary surveillance of surgical site infections, nor are their plans to add it. The surveillance programme is developed in partnership with the National Health Service and focuses on surgeries where there is a high risk of infection and poor health outcomes following infection.

In the development of the tariff, the Ophthalmology Experts Working Group (EWG) confirmed that minimally invasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS) and cataract activity are commonly done together and it would not usually be in the patient’s best interest to do them separately. The EWG advised that the tariff was appropriate for combined MIGS and cataract activity.