Visual Impairment: Health Services

(asked on 10th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the (a) availability and (b) average waiting times for NHS eyesight services.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 13th March 2020

There is no evidence that patients looking to access National Health Service sight tests in primary care are facing delays. There were 13.2 million NHS sight tests carried out in 2018/19, an increase of 1.5% on the previous year.

The current NHS access standard for referral to elective treatment requires that patients will be seen within a maximum waiting time of 18 weeks. Clinical priority is the main determinant of when patients should be treated followed by the chronological order of when they were added to the list.

There were 2 million first outpatients ophthalmology appointments, within NHS trusts in England or commissioned in England from the independent sector, during 2018/19 and of those, the average waiting time (mean), as reported by NHS Digital Hospital Episodes Statistics, was 51 days.

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