In Focus: Could Covid’s cloud have a silver lining for eye care?

Millions of missed appointments, cancelled follow ups and a collapse in referrals were the consequences of the pandemic period on clinical eye care services across the UK.

This bleak picture of optics was painted in stark detail with the publication of The State of the UK’s Eye Health 2021 last week. The report, commissioned by Specsavers, and carried out by Deloitte Access Economics, relayed in grim minutiae how eye care services were withdrawn, cancelled and restricted in the face of the Covid pandemic. An already stretched eye care services community saw the number of routine eye examinations plummet by 23% in 2020 compared with 2019. That was a massive 4.3 million eye tests not carried out leading to huge knock-on effects for the whole sector. Referrals in the nine months to December 2020 fell by 316,000 on the same period a year earlier. Glaucoma referrals fell by 43,000, of which 2,600 might have expected to require urgent treatment, over 10,800 wet age-related macular (AMD) sufferers failed to make it to hospital while 6,133 diabetic retinopathy cases stayed at home.