Optometry has a key role to play in the future of primary eye care but the future NHS requires more proactivity, a holistic approach to patients and better accessibility to eye care for at risk groups delegates at the NOC heard last week.
Taryn Harding, senior programme lead, primary care strategies NHS England, in her keynote address on the themes from the Call to Action provided some early findings for delegates and highlighted the priorities for the NHS going forward.
To deliver better patient care, as outlined in the NHS's five year plan, she said local providers needed to work more closely together and more closely with local NHS structures. NHS England was committed to giving local Clinical Commission Groups greater autonomy, she said. Optometry could get involved in primary care through involvement, with other professions, in Local Professional Networks while local Health and Wellbeing Boards would concentrate on improving the general health of their local populations.
Harding said primary care was too reactive and the NHS wanted to see more collaborative working and a more patient centred, preventative approach. Harding also shared her 'Pic 'n' Mix' wishlist of improvements and key findings from the CtA. These included better accessibility for under served groups, such as the homeless, those with learning difficulties, sex workers, non-English speakers and gypsies. Better use of IT, improved local structures and leadership, better use of existing skills and improved accuracy of referrals. Such improvements would enable early intervention and prevention of eye disease and vision loss.
Lessons from other sectors, such as pharmacy, could be learned through schemes like as Pharmacy First, perhaps there could be an Optician first scheme, she added. Harding also wanted to see more consistency in primary care delivery, continuing education and co-location of primary care provision.
In a lively question and answer session Harding agreed that the level of the sight test fee created a business model that deterred attendance among some groups and that spectacle sales subsidised NHS services. 'We do need to have a discussion about what the right fee should be,' she said. Harding later qualified this saying: 'There is no more money in the NHS. We have to think about the effect on other areas.'
LOCSU managing director Katerina Venrerus told Optician: 'The key message from this year’s conference for me is that at last the NHS has acknowledged that it needs to change, and just as important, the community optical sector is ready and willing to play its part in providing more “out of hospital care” along with our colleagues in general practice, pharmacy and dentistry. We heard from Taryn Harding of NHS England some of the main themes emerging from the responses to the Call to Action and were encouraged by Taryn’s comments that these themes would be central to a new approach that promoted a preventative partnership that would allow radical change by building primary care services at scale.'