Transforming eye care services in West Yorkshire

Hello my name is Catherine.

The eye care transformation programme, part of planned care, is unfortunately coming to a close this month. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Louise Corp, our Programme Lead, Sarah Sharps, our Project Manager, and all those who have worked with us over the past four years to transform eye care services.

It all began in 2019 with a one-day event in Leeds for eye care stakeholders from across West Yorkshire. The challenge – how could we work together to transform eye care services? It was clear that those attending the event had the passion and vision to create something different and better - they just needed a bit of help to make it happen.

We started by establishing an eye care working group to steer the work in the right direction. Four sub-groups, each with an ophthalmologist, an optometrist, an eye care liaison officer and a commissioning manager, worked on the key areas: cataracts; glaucoma; medical retina; and paediatrics, and later we added another sub-group for digital projects.

Successes of the sub-groups include:

• Harmonisation of the clinical access policies, updating them in line with NICE guidance.
• Creating clinical pathways, standardised across West Yorkshire.
• Looking at how we work with community optometrists to make the most of all the skills and resources available.
• Implementing a new electronic referral system that enables optometrists to refer into hospital eye services, without the need to go through a GP and the functionality to include images and diagnostic test results for better quality triaging.
• Standardising and expanding the commissioning of enhanced optometrist services to reduce unnecessary referrals to hospital, and to support growing demand.
• Supporting a funding offer to progress optometrists with higher qualifications to provide enhanced services.
• Providing access to specialist laser training for secondary care colleagues to progress their skills in glaucoma and cataract management.
• Promoting the use of mobile phones during community optometry assessments to take images of the eye, reducing referrals to hospital for such images to be taken.
• Agreeing a West Yorkshire pathway for including the new anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) drugs for wet aged-related macular degeneration, a positive change that also resulted in a cost saving for our hospital trusts.
• Development of My Eye Health, a web-based portal that will be a single resource of eye health information and guidance for people of all ages across West Yorkshire. The portal, which will also have a login section for eye care professionals, will launch during Vision Awareness Week (18 to 24 September 2023).

One of the most important aims of the eye care programme has been to increase awareness and prevention, looking at eye care as a lifetime journey. We have worked with a local animation company, and our learning disability champions to create two animations - one for young people and adults, and one for young children. These have only just been completed, see below for an exclusive first look of what we have created.

The end of the eye care transformation programme doesn’t mean the end of the work, and definitely doesn’t mean the end of a system-wide collaborative approach to continuously developing and improving eye care services in West Yorkshire. We have established an ophthalmology clinical network for the hospital eye service providers. This group will work with the West Yorkshire Local Eye Health Network to keep driving forward patient-centred improvements in care.

It has been a wonderful experience working with such passionate and motivated people on a shared vision. The progress we have made has been fantastic, and the best thing is that the relationships and new ways of working together leave behind a sustainable mechanism for the work to continue.