A wider scope for sight

The charity 4Sight has won several national awards over the past 18 months for its innovative and high quality services. It has ambitious plans to continue to perform well and would like to work more closely with optical professionals. 

Unlike many traditional charities (4Sight is 85 years old) 4Sight is not new to change management. It has developed a number of new services in response to identified but unmet needs. These achievements resulted in a series of national accolades, including the King’s Fund award for services to health for a mobile training service helping visually impaired elders to learn to cook and to prepare food alone. It is widely acknowledged that the movement of patients into residential care settings post vision loss is largely the result of a decline in nutritional health. 4Sight operates across West Sussex, a county with the highest UK incidence of age-related vision loss. County Social and Caring Services stated that the charity’s work had turned the tide of movement into residential care homes, against national trends.

4Sight’s Listening and Information Service offers support at two county hospital eye clinics, utilising ophthalmic staff nurses who explain the effects of the diagnosis while referring onwards to available forms of support. The charity completes the registration process in three working days compared with the national average of three to five months. This work took the NHS Gold Merit award for quality. In the next few months this service will expand to include low vision services undertaken on behalf of the NHS.

The management of this and 4Sight’s other services will be co-ordinated with the use of a paperless system designed by ophthalmic consultants, facilitating the instant exchange of information relating to diagnosis, treatment, and referral. This system speeds up the patient pathway, and enables the charity to offer information to clients in all formats including Braille and large print.

VersaSuite, the company behind the dissemination of this new system, helps professionals including optometrists to manage their businesses within national and regional frameworks. 4Sight would like to invite all professionals working with vision loss issues to become a link in its innovative ‘referral chain’.

‘Optometrists miss out on the opportunity to undertake work with our clients,’ says 4Sight’s CEO Kate Schroder. ‘Since most of our people have some remaining vision, albeit often fragmented, the focus should be upon ensuring its best use for as long as possible. When an eye clinic diagnosis is given, the patient response is often to discount visiting the local optician due to a misunderstanding about what help may be given. So many of our people neglect to manage remaining vision between hospital visits.

‘For many patients this period of time may become critical since remaining vision may be retained and any underlying conditions may be identified, with prompt support between hospital visits. Working together we may undertake to reverse this trend, helping patients to maintain optimum use of remaining sight.’