Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce waiting times for ophthalmology services in Newbury constituency.

We are committed to returning by March 2029 to the National Health Service constitutional standard that 92% of patients wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral to consultant-led treatment, across all specialties. In March 2026, we hit our first interim target of 65% performance against that standard. For ophthalmology, performance in March reached 72.9%, 4.6% up from a year earlier.

We remain focused on further improving elective waiting times, including for ophthalmology services. We are expanding the number of surgical hubs, like the one at West Berkshire Community Hospital, which provide dedicated and protected elective capacity to drive improvement in six specialities, including ophthalmology. We are reducing missed appointments through enhanced two-way communication between hospitals and patients, supported by artificial intelligence prediction tools. We are also expanding the use of remote monitoring and patient-initiated follow up, where appropriate, to offer patients more flexibility over their care.

From 2027, our new ‘online hospital’, NHS Online, will help to reduce patient waiting times across England by giving people on certain pathways, including glaucoma, conditions such as age-related macular degeneration, and cataracts, the choice of getting the specialist care that they need from their home. NHS Online will deliver the equivalent of up to 8.5 million appointments and assessments in its first three years across all specialities.