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National Screening Committee chiefs will write to all directors of primary care trusts reminding them of the importance of local visual screening for children, with a view to safeguarding eye health and educational development.

The announcement was made by Dr David Elliman of the UK National Screening Committee (UNSC) at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Eye Health and Visual Impairment's meeting to consider children's vision screening on October 22.

MPs at the event also heard from Professor David Thomson of City University, who told Optician: 'There are real opportunities for optometrists to get involved with screening since there aren't enough orthoptists to do the tests.'

Professor Thomson said that current national screening recommendations set out by the UNSC were unworkable, since 700,000 children required screening each year and there were only 1,300 orthoptists in the UK.

He presented a model for screening developed along with orthoptists in Barnet PCT that is due to be trialled in Wales with a view to rolling it out across the principality. The software was developed to manage the entire screening process, carried out by assistants equipped with laptops, trained by orthoptists. It generates customised letters for the parents of each child.

Children who fail the screening are examined by a team of orthoptists, OOs and ophthalmologists in a secondary clinic. Results of evaluating the software on 336 children aged four to five in six Barnet schools showed it had sensitivity and specificity of 94 per cent and 98 per cent when compared to a clinical evaluation. The model has proved so cost-effective that an extra screening at the age of seven was to be added in Barnet this academic year.

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