Ophthalmic Services

(asked on 27th January 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to increase capacity in NHS eyesight services and ensure all patients are seen within a safe time frame.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 30th January 2020

Clinical commissioning groups are responsible for commissioning secondary care ophthalmology services to meet local need. We would expect services to be commissioned in line with National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance where it is available or best available evidence and for patients to receive treatment, in line with their clinical priority, without any undue delay at any stage of their referral, diagnosis or treatment.

National Health Service patients have a right in the NHS Constitution to drugs and treatments recommended by the NICE, where the patient's clinician considers it appropriate.

As part of the NHS Long Term Plan, the goal of the outpatients transformation programme is to avoid 30 million face-to-face outpatients appointments and reduce face-to-face visits to hospital outpatients by up to a third by 2023/24. NHS England and NHS Improvement estimate that this could save up to £1 billion in expenditure. If the programme achieves its goals, it will mean the successful creation of a digital-first outpatients service, which gives all appropriate patients the option for a virtual outpatients appointment. NHS England and NHS Improvement advise that ophthalmology has been identified as the first priority speciality for the National Outpatient Transformation Programme.

Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) is a national clinical improvement programme, working with frontline clinicians to identify and reduce unwarranted variations in service delivery and clinical practice. NHS England advise the GIRFT report into ophthalmology shared with providers in December 2019, identifies a number of recommendations for service improvement to help to free up capacity and help to address the issue of delays to follow-up appointments.

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