Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he has taken steps in response to the recommendations of the report entitled See the light: Improving capacity in NHS eye care in England, published by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Eye Health and Visual Impairment in June 2018.

The Department welcomed the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report, ‘See the Light: Improving capacity in NHS eye care in England’. We have taken the concerns of the profession and the wider sight loss sector about timeliness of patient access to eye care services very seriously.

In response to concerns about timely access to care, two key initiatives the Elective Care Transformation Programme led by NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Getting It Right First Time programme have considered, as part of their respective programmes, how we can improve patient outcomes in secondary care eye care services and ensure that patients do not suffer unnecessary delays in follow-up care.

The Department is currently working with stakeholders to finalise the response to the report, which will be sent to the APPG at the earliest opportunity and following this, published on the gov.uk website.