About 16 million visitors a year spend more than £1 billion in the market towns in and around the UK’s largest national park. There are market towns on the borders of the parkland, such as Penrith, Carlisle or Kendal that are host to groups of high street practices. However, bleary-eyed hikers stumbling on the small towns and villages within the national park can find four opticians serving the sporadic communities that live across 885 square miles of mountainous pastoral arcadia.
Director and optometrist at Ambleside Opticians, Uzma Ahmed, says: ‘The ratio between NHS to private eye exams in our practice is 3:1. The settled community present a lot of age-related eye conditions.’
Uzma Ahmed, director of Ambleside Opticians
Ahmed’s practice is located in Ambleside, home to a population of about 3,000, a town located in the centre of the national park. The retail market accelerates each summer when the tourists of the national park flock through the town that is situated at the northern head of Windermere, England’s largest ribbon lake with an area of 14.73 km².
The practice offers an urgent appointment service to manage eye injuries or infections that require immediate referral to the eye clinic that is run via fax. It also promotes a visitors’ eye care service with a secure mailing service to encourage one-off visitors to purchase store products. The selection of frames includes: Oakley, Ray Ban and Rudi Project. The director says: ‘The sunglass lenses can be photochromic, polarised or offer interchangeable filters for outdoor activities available locally, like shooting and golf.’
‘The Lake District has a very small population that explodes in the summer,’ says Paul Smith, director at Butterfield Opticians based in Keswick. ‘There are two independent practices in town. Tourism brings more urgent repair jobs for our dispensing optician. We also get visiting patients seeking treatment or diagnosis for flashes, floaters and scratched eyes. Being
an IP accredited practice means we can tide emergency patients over until they get home from their holiday.’
Direct referral pathways to eye departments exist in the south lakes catchment, but practices in the north-lakes still must refer via the patient’s GP. However, this is set to change in coming months says a director and dispensing optician of Bagot Opticians, Timothy Bagot.
‘Community eye care in the Lake District spans two clinical commissioning groups,’ says Bagot. ‘The patient base is split between the north Cumbria University hospital trust and Morecambe Bay hospital trust. Kendal eye department only supports routine referrals, so the optometrist has to refer emergency patients to either Lancaster or Barrow in Furness, which is miles away.
He adds: ‘In August local practices will get a Pears minor eye conditions referral scheme. A pediatric pathway for people who fail vision screenings at local schools, IOP referral refinement and pre and post-cataract is also set to be introduced in the near future. In north Cumbria we are only getting IOP refinement and pediatric school screening referrals.’
Who’s in town
Total: 4
Independents: 4
Multiples: 0
Average costs
Prices for an eye examination range from £23 to £35 (no practices in the park yet offer an OCT scan). The average cost is £28.25
Population
Community eye care
According to the Locsu Atlas Map of Optical Variation, Cumbria Local Optical Committee has secured contracts for glaucoma repeat readings and low vision.
Health and affluence
- The average house price in Cumbria is £124,631, compared with an average of £189,901 for England and Wales (Land Registry, 2016)
- NHS expenditure on vision problems per person is £108, compared with the UK average of £89 (RNIB Sight Loss Data Tool 2015)
- 6,220 patients live in the area with cataract, 5,040 with glaucoma, and 35,230 suffer from with diabetes, 10,080 patients have diabetic retinopathy (RNIB).
- 4,010 patients living in Cumbria with early stage wet AMD, 1,960 with dry AMD (RNIB).
- Men in Cumberland and Westmorland continue to uphold a chest-to-chest wrestling tradition, which was established in the Viking era.
- England’s tallest mountain, Scafell Pike, pictured below, peaks within the National Park.
- Clergyman, James Plumptre, published The Lakers in 1798: a comic play satirising Lake District tourism and the fashion for botany.
- The National Park was the home to the Lake Poets, including leaders of the Romantics movement: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.
- Graphite was discovered in a Lake District valley.