Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has plans to collect outcome data in ophthalmology at a Clinical Commissioning Group level.

The Department and NHS England take any evidence of delays in treatment affecting outcomes very seriously and are currently carefully considering the recommendations of the recent wide-ranging report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on eye health “Seeing the light”.

Outcome data on avoidable sight loss is collected nationally. It is published regularly through the sight loss indicator in the Public Health Outcomes Framework. This data is published at national, regional and unitary authority level. Sight loss is strongly linked to, among other factors, demographics. It is not possible to identify through the data collected nationally any impact of delays in treatment. There are no current plans to publish this data in a different format such as by clinical commissioning group and doing so would not enable outcomes to be linked specifically to any delays in treatment.